Listen : Audio version of this article |
Deepwater Horizon tragedy took place in 2010 had shivered the nation for months. Almost 200 million gallons of oil gets spilt which is spread up to 16,000 miles along the coastline of Florida and Texas. Nearly 8,000 animals and 11 workers were killed because of this explosion. The major reason behind this spillage was an older spill spewing from an oil platform. Taylor spill is the major offshore environmental disaster in US history.
Desperate of justice submitted a report which shows that because of this Taylor spill every day around 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of oil is spewing. SkyTruth, a satellite organization said the leakage from the beginning of the spill is around 8,55,000 to 4 million gallons by the end of 2017.
IOT is transforming oil and Gas industries to a major extent which also eliminates unplanned good outages, the crude output will be boosted by 10 % in 2 years of time. In the next decade, IoT is predicted to increase the GDP by 0.8 per cent.
After Taylor spill incident we must have a clear picture of the cleanup, current and future plans for the better detection of these incidents. Hence the following questions are to be addressed.
- What are the chances to learn and grow from these incidents?
- For enhancing detection what kind of new technologies are available
- What kind of preventive measures will be replaced with existing technologies?
5 Major Preventive Measures in Oil And Gas Industries:
After the oil spill incident, several operational and maintenance measures are taken in oil and gas industries like Locating work history, Plan for repair or replacement, Allowing managers to monitor and track asset functionality.
Maintenance steps to be performed every day includes:
- Crew members should be trained with new technologies and better documentation
- For assessing accuracy, the stress test is to be performed and tracking with management documentation
- Blueprint creation: For responding quickly to oil spillage and the better assessment of the situation it allows the users to use the existing technology for responding.
- Remote vehicles: As a backup in disaster, robots will assist the crew members.
All these measures are to be coupled with EAM CMMS solutions for executing tasks efficiently and properly by engineers and managers. Technology had advanced in the last nine years mainly in areas like virtual reality, IoT, Augmented reality and Drones maintenance. It was estimated that by 2020 nearly 50 billion machines will be connected which is the best way to guide workers and engineers. IoT can help oil industries for the underwater communication system.
How Oil and Gas can leverage AI:
Oil and gas sectors will become smarter with the implementation of AI methods.
1.planning and forecasting:
Future investment decisions will be understood with deep machine learning on a micro scale. weather predictions can be assessed to determine where investments should be centred.
2. Costly Drilling Risks should be eliminated:
The most expensive of the whole process is drilling. The risk associated with the activity can be decreased with applications of AI in the planning and implementing stages. Some of these factors include thermal gradients, strata permeability and seismic vibrations. AI can optimize all operations by directing decisions related to speed and direction.
IoT underwater communication:
There are numerous benefits of IoT in all the industries. Safety is possible by the ability to remotely monitoring the machines. There are many technical challenges while underwater monitoring and communication is a problem in which IoT underwater came into play. IoT underwater system contains underwater sensors which send the information to the surface networks. This information helps to detect animals health, temperature and salinity changes, prior detection of tsunami, shipwrecks and crashes.
IoT mainly helps to sense and transmit the data which is keen on the protection of oceans and seas. This helps to alert engineers and oil rigs alerting them if something is wrong before the cause of any calamity. Yet, there are major challenges faced by IoT while transmission of data in underground water like the high cost of sensors, background noise, signal transmission, ever-changing environment.
To handle all these hurdles, companies are looking for solutions. Underwater robots and prototypes are introduced for testing the roadblocks and to check out the communication in underwater. It’s the most innovative way to protect the oceans and humans from dangerous situations.
IoT technology had delivered high value for upstream, midstream and downstream.
Upstream:
It is used for preventive maintenance of remote gas and oil equipment.
Midstream:
Midstream helps for environmental monitoring and regulatory compliance
Downstream:
Downstream helps to enable distributors with the real-time supply chain.
IoT promises for yielding numerous applications which include underwater exploration, environmental monitoring, disaster prevention. The use of IoT has improved the way humans interact with infrastructure on land, some now see applications that will prevent underwater ecological disasters.