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Bottom Line Focus Will Drive Oil and Gas Wireless Sensor Network Revenues to $2.2 Billion in 2023 |
At a pivotal time for the oil and gas industry, wireless sensor networks (WSN) are connecting stranded assets, streamlining operations and reducing deployment costs, according to a recently published report by global IoT research firm ON World. “Oil and gas WSNs are helping oil and gas companies operate on thinning margins while maximizing output from existing resources,” says Mareca Hatler, ON World’s research director. “The latest innovations including multiprotocol wireless mesh devices, passive sensors, wireless MEMs and Low Power Wide Area networks provide a new generation of solutions for connecting remote assets as well as enabling exploration projects to go deeper in challenging environments.” WSNs provide up to 80% savings in infrastructure costs and enable hundreds of applications including remote monitoring from offshore platforms, battery-less sensors in Arctic oilfields, pipeline leak monitoring in South Africa, wireless seismic sensors and continuous monitoring for stripper wells. As oil prices continue to rise and exploration activity increases, WSN adoption is steadily growing for core applications such as wellhead automation and pipeline compressor/pump station monitoring as well as growing innovations for asset management, worker safety and environmental monitoring. ON World’s Q2 2018 survey of 159 industrial automation professionals found that 43% are targeting oil and gas applications. Two in five of the oil and gas respondents have installed over 1,000 WSN nodes across all locations. Twenty percent (20%) have deployed networks with at least 3,000 nodes compared with 6% in our previous survey in Q4 2016. ON World’s survey found that the fastest growing oil and gas WSN applications are asset tracking and locating, process control, environmental/safety and asset/machine health monitoring. Wireless gas detection is an increasingly popular safety application with several products available today including ISA100 Wireless compliant devices by GasSecure (Dräger), New Cosmos Electric, Riken Keiki as well as WirelessHART devices by Emerson and United Electric Controls. RAE Systems (Honeywell) provides a multi-radio wireless gas detector that includes wireless mesh, WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Other innovations include a wireless mesh worker safety platform by Scandinavian Reach Technology (SRT) and Kongsberg Maritime’s continuous temperature monitoring solution that uses SENSeOR’s wireless passive SAW sensors to monitor bearings and other moving parts on offshore platforms and shipping tankers. Applications for wireless mesh sensor networks continues to grow, illustrated by ABB’s WirelessHART equipment monitoring network deployed on the Goliat floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) in the Barents Sea near Norway. ON World’s survey found that over half of the oil and gas respondents are using WirelessHART and/or ISA100 Wireless. However, adoption of Bluetooth, WiFi and Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies such as LoRaWAN™, NB-IoT, LTE-M and Sigfox has increased faster. A few of the oil and gas LPWA products and platforms that have emerged over the past two years include the following:
In 2023, global WSN revenues for oil and gas exploration, production and pipeline operation will reach $2.2 billion up from $480 million in 2017. Production will make up 60% of the revenues by this time, including wellhead automation, asset/equipment monitoring, asset tracking and locating as well as safety and environmental applications. More information about ON World’s report, “Oil and Gas Wireless Sensor Networks,” and a free executive summary is available from: https://www.onworld.com/oilandgas About ON World: Media contact: Back to News 10/4/2018 |