Wireless Sensor Networking Brings Energy Solutions To The Oil & Gas Sector
San Diego, CA - An accelerating energy crisis in the oil and gas industry is driving development and investment in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies, according to a recently published report by ON World.
"While profits are high, the cost of doing business is increasing and oil and gas supplies are becoming more difficult and expensive to find and exploit," says Mareca Hatler, ON World's Director of Research. "This has accelerated demand for wireless sensing and control solutions in this industry, representing a cumulative Total Potential Market (TPM) of 25 million units worldwide."
ON World's recent survey of senior managers with the world's leading oil and gas companies found that 35% are current wireless sensor users and nearly half plan to investigate WSN within the next 18 months. While most of the current WSN sales are for refineries and petrochemical plants, exploration and production, pipelines, and transportation are the most disruptive opportunities for new entrants. Some of the largest WSN innovations areas are pipeline internal corrosion monitoring, automated offshore platforms, advanced geological survey technologies, and nanotechnologies for advanced extraction techniques.
The world's largest oil and gas companies such as BP, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, ExonnMobil, Occidental Petroleum, and Royal Dutch Shell are driving WSN inventions and leading industrial wireless standards efforts. WSN pioneers such as Adaptive Instruments and Honeywell are facing competition from 802.15.4 based mesh solutions from Emerson and dozens of other vendors such as Endress+Hauser, Pepperl+Fuchs, and Yokogawa that plan to support the upcoming industrial WSN standards.
New entrants are also joining the fight for the oil and gas WSN market. They include Aginova with patents related to pipeline integrity monitoring and security; IntelliSensing (Greatbatch) with advanced wireless pressure and temperature sensors, signal conditioners, gateways, and Web Services; and vMonitor with ultra small wireless sensors and long range wireless gateways targeted at upstream applications.
Potentially disruptive technologies are coming to market such as low power WiFi chipsets that present opportunities for seamless enterprise integration of wireless monitoring and control. Also the emergence of the "Super node" provides advanced on-node processing, multiple sensors, and multi protocol radios.
ON World's survey of over 100 of leading oil and gas companies, industry experts, vendors, and suppliers confirmed that 11% are currently using WiFi for wireless sensing and control. The survey also found that 35% are highly interested in integrating WSN solutions with their plant IP network and 66% place a high value on having a single integrated network.
ON World's recently published research report, "WSN for Oil & Gas," includes actionable research data on current end user adoption trends and needs analysis, coverage of 62 competitors in four product segments, and five year global market size forecasts. In addition, this report provides several simulation scenarios using ON World's wsnPowerSimulator that models the power consumption of WSN nodes based on the radio, processor, sensor, payload, and duty cycle used.
SOURCE: ON World Inc.