Dragging the Oilfield into the 21st Century
The world's largest oil and gas industry convention is in Houston this week. Its called the Offshore Technology Conference or OTC. If you're in the world-wide hydrocarbon energy industry, you and/or your competitors and your vendors are here. There are literally hundreds of companies exhibiting. Mostly there is the biggest collection of things made out of big pieces of pipe. For monitoring and controlling oil and gas wells all sorts of instrumentation is on display. And of course safety equipment, chemicals, construction materials, equipment and services. The amount of equipment and booth space covering environmental and renewable energy (believe it or not!) was impressive as well.
In the booths there are lots of computer systems being used for the demos or as products for sale. Those were of the most interest. One observation that can be reported this year is that the technological state of the oil and gas industry, particularly in the application of computers, has finally caught up with the rest of the world.
This year they didn't have a helicopter inside the exhibition hall like in years past but they did have 7 or 8 semi-tractor (or lorrie) sized oilfield related special purpose trucks. Besides differential GPS, all of them were equipped with computer systems for instrumentation, data collection and analysis.
Truck mounted or mobile land-based drilling rig systems have become a significant part of the industry. Out in front of the exhibit hall, 4 land-based drilling rigs complete with derricks were setup in the parking lot outside. At least one of them had a monitoring system using my computer system design on it.
Computers that are designed to be used in the severe working environments on drilling rigs require a special safety certification. So those vendors usually exhibit each year showing (hopefully) their new equipment. We build our drill floor systems using those sorts of computers and need to visit the OTC show to see what's newly available. Its only faintly like the CES show in Las Vegas.
There were a number of systems exhibited where the driller sits in a power driven chair and operates the drilling motors and systems. Usually they had 2 joysticks connected to a number of computers controlling and monitoring it all. Another driller's chair had 4 touch screen equipped panel computers all mounted and able to swivel with the driller as he moved around. One system had software programmable touchscreen “switches” built into the arms on the chair. Most of the control functions needed by a driller were all remote control enabled or “waldo'ed” through the combinations of switches, control knobs and the joysticks.
One of the systems enabled by a combination of computers is a semi-automated “roughneck” that can grab a 30 foot piece of drill pipe weighing more than a ton and move it around to make connections to the drill string already in the hole. All of this technology allows the driller to easily do the work of 2 or 3 rig-hands. It used to be controlled manually through a hydraulic controller. Now the controller gets its commands from a computer operated by the Driller manipulating the joystick.
Of much larger interest than all the mechanical marvels was the sudden acceptance by the industry of the complete span of communications, computers and Internet enabled functions long used by other industries. Satellite dishes were everywhere. VOIP, remote desktop management, email, teleconferencing, database servers, Wifi, WiMax, broadband, 3G all of it is in use or being sold to the rig owners. The scope of change that has occurred in the last 2 or 3 years has been amazing.
Wireless Ethernet access points, routers, switches and client radios offered for sale have been tested and certified for use in potentially explosive environments by various vendors. That has been a serious shortcoming for computer systems installed on drilling rigs.
Fiber optic cable, although used previously on off-shore rigs, has become a standard inventory product offering by all the marine cable manufacturers. That doesn't sound like a big deal until you know that the fiber optic cable has to be jacketed with a stranded bronze mesh braid, an internal large gauge steel wire used as a strength-member, a couple of fire and damage resistant plastic layers and finally a seawater-proof, flame-retardant jacketed covering. What starts out as 4 or 5 pairs of optical fibers in very small tubes comes out as cable an inch or two in diameter.
Flat screen LCD and plasma panel displays being driven by computers were just about everywhere with as many as 40 or 50 screens visible in the largest booths. Even in the 10'x10' booths there would be at least 1 or 2 LCD displays showing the products offered. Just a few years back video being played back from DVD or VCRs predominated the display technology. There wasn't any of that visible this year, it was all digital.
Laptop computers were being used and carried by thousands of people both in the booths and in the aisles. It looked almost like a programmers convention!
A few years ago, WiFi or wireless Ethernet connections were few and hard to connect to in the hall. This year the RF spectrum space was jammed with all of the Ethernet and Internet activity going on from the booths and the convention attendees.
The other very heartening observation is that Linux seems to have an equal acceptance with Windows as the underpinning operating system. It wasn't evident that Windows has lost any ground in total number of desktops but Linux was obviously in use in a number of mission-critical applications. Even the salesmen seemed to be aware that Linux was something special for certain products and the idea of an “embedded computer” was not an alien concept. At least in “mind-share” Linux and Windows are equals in the oilfield.