Drilling Companies and RFID

The successful land-drilling product and services provider, Nabors Canada is going to install passive high-frequency tags on its oil rigs, to help it track equipment and manage inspection and certification procedures.

The Nabors Canada is employing RFID technology to help it maintain and manage the equipment on its drill rigs, located at oil and gas wells across Canada. With this technology Nabors Canada's management can know where its assets are at any particular time, as well as whether they have been maintained and inspected, and when.

The system resolves a labor-intensive problem of tracking the locations, conditions and histories of hundreds of assets at remote sites. Most items, such as generators, pumps and motors installed on oil-drilling rigs, are tracked through paperwork filled out by crews at the drilling site, then manually transferred into Nabors' database at its office. Management is typically then provided with weekly or daily reports regarding the assets, based on the paper-based records. That system would give his company electronic records pertaining to the location, inspection and certification history of each piece of equipment, in real time. So the transparency inside the company will be ensured and the security will be increased.

A typical oil rig has an average of a hundred items that need to be maintained and handled. Tracking all of those assets on each of 86 different drilling rigs across Canada is a difficult task for all oil companies. Assets can be moved from rig to rig, from a rig to a different part of the drill yard, or from one drill yard to another. The assets regularly end up missing, a result of their being misplaced or stolen, and are eventually written off and replaced. In addition, the equipment often needs to be inspected, and sometimes certified which require some recording. In this part, the RFID can help a lot by increasing the efficiency inside the company.

Resource: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/print/5002