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Petroleum Industry Turns to Texas for Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID)
Other Topics:
RFID Inlays,
RFID Patient Care
Oil & Gas RFID Solution Group
July 19, 2008
Houston, TX -- Exceptionally high crude prices and surging global
demand have led the oil & gas industry to seek out technologies such
as RFID as a means of gaining operational insight within their
organizations. Everything from streamlining product procurement to
enhancing safety and reliability of field equipment can be automated
or improved through an RFID technology backbone. |
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Leading this wave of
industry support is the Oil & Gas RFID Solution Group. An alliance
of subject-matter experts, academic researchers, and technology
providers consisting of Texas A&M University, University of Houston,
Avery Dennison, Merlin Concepts & Technology, Shipcom Wireless,
Motorola Inc, and a handful of leading petroleum companies. This
multi-disciplinary field of experts is helping exploration,
drilling, and production organizations identify, define, develop,
and deploy RFID systems to address fundamental issues that are
inherent to their respective fields.
“The group has been created as a means to unify the industry’s
direction and synchronize its efforts with respect to product and
standards development. Serving as a think-tank and research and
development center to build the next-generation of RFID systems for
the petroleum industry. We are here to assist and work hand-in-hand
with the oil & gas market space to achieve successful and
value-added deployment of this technology by supporting these
organizations through our comprehensive set of field-experts, our
RFID lab facilities, real-world test environments, and standards
development roadmaps,” says Dr. Ben Zoghi, Director of the Oil & Gas
Solution Group & Professor at Texas A&M University.
The solution group offers an arena for the petroleum industry to
communicate their underlying needs and align them with the
technology. It offers petroleum companies the ability to voice their
requirements for specific applications of RFID and have the experts
in the solution group deliver on these requirements. It also offers
a way of building a consolidated methodology of exchanging and
interpreting information related to the collected RFID data.
“One of the objectives of our group is to provide a concise and
clear direction for how the petroleum market can use radio frequency
identification technology. This entails defining best-practices,
operational processes, data-models, and application architectures.
Outlining these steps is a critical precursor to industry adoption.
Building this foundation provides a clear view of where and how RFID
technology can be used,” says Konrad Konarski, a founding member of
the Oil & Gas Solution Group and Vice-President of Merlin Concepts
and Technology.
Standards development can embody defining the data-schema of an RFID
tag but it can also involve understanding operational conditions.
For instance, how the cocktail of chemicals inserted into a drill
string affects readability and survivability of a tag. Hydrochloric
acid for acid fracturing, hydrogen sulfide from down hole corrosive
gases, or barite in the drilling mud, are all factors that determine
how RFID technology can be used and how it needs to be designed and
developed to work effectively. Understanding these environmental
factors helps define best practices that integrators can use to
interpret critical components of system development and thereby
successfully build RFID technologies for these application areas.
EPC Global, the international standards board for RFID technology,
is also playing an active part in accelerating this industry’s move
towards RFID. The standards board is currently working in
collaboration with the Oil & Gas Solution Group to achieve these
underlying objectives and develop the next-generation in RFID
Systems for this industry.
“A thriving [petroleum] market space brings with it great
complexity. Supplier networks have become more intricate, drilling
locations more diverse, and consumer markets more wide-spread. As
such, there is fundamental need to leverage next-generation
technologies such as RFID to enhance asset utilization and
streamline operational processes. RFID technology clearly possesses
the ability to support the industries growth and address some of its
critical pain-points,” adds Alex Heredia, Vice-President of Oil &
Gas for Shipcom Wireless and member of the Oil & Gas Solution Group.
With these new RFID systems capable of storing more information, in
extreme environmental surroundings, while being read at longer
distances, and maintaining lower price points, the industry is in
line for a variety of new and revolutionary application areas of the
technology. Current uses of the technology include drill-pipe
validation, circulation sub actuation, perforating gun triggering,
personnel geo-fencing, and supply chain visibility, among others.
The list will continue to grow and the adoption rate increase as the
Oil & Gas Solution Group and others drive RFID as a business tool
that enables process intelligence by revolutionizing procurement,
production, and process control.
The Oil & Gas RFID (OGR) Solution Group brings together select
industry subject matter experts, academic researchers and technology
service providers to identify, define, develop, and deploy cutting
edge solutions for Exploration, Production, Drilling, and Product
Manufacturing in the Oil & Gas market. By educating and refining the
customers understanding of what the technology can do for them, and
developing systems with the help of a consolidated effort of Oil &
Gas professionals, the solutions group is creating scalable
application systems and data standards, and helping generate
understanding and adoption of Radio Frequency Identification within
the Oil & Gas Industry. |
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