Location Awareness in Oil & Gas
Dr. Charlotte Richardson, Product Development Manager S3 ID, considers how the need for enhanced location awareness of personnel has developed in the Oil & Gas industry and how new technologies have evolved over the last decade providing innovative solutions that not only enhance the safety and security of personnel but also provide some serious commercial advantages further justifying expenditure in this area.
Introduction
In 1988, the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea caught fire and exploded. Piper Alpha was – and still is – the world’s worst offshore oil disaster. Of the 226 people on the platform, 165 died, two rescue workers perished, and 30 bodies have never been recovered. As a result of this disaster, many changes in regulations and legislation were introduced leading to a much greater overall focus on safety in the Oil and Gas industry.
Evidence of this has been the ever increasing importance of the location awareness of personnel and the implementation of enhanced safety precautions. For example, Muster drills are now carried out weekly to ensure, should the worst happen, everyone is prepared and has the best chance of survival.
Technology Developments over the Last Decade
Mechanisms for locating and accounting for personnel are a fundamental part of disaster planning. In the off-shore Oil & Gas industry, location awareness and mustering of personnel poses different problems to those experienced on-shore, for example, in refinery sites or across larger geographical areas along transmission pipelines. The last decade has seen considerable technological developments in all of these areas and today there are several technologies that can be used.
Advances in detectors, antenna designs and protection techniques have increased the reliability, range and performance of RFID systems and, as the option to use computers and wireless technology in hazardous areas has become possible, information from location awareness systems can now be displayed locally on GUIs. Also, developments in electronics mean that circuits can be miniaturised, making equipment more portable and less intrusive.
The Application of Location Awareness in the Oil & Gas Industry
Figure 1 below shows a simplified representation of the Oil & Gas industry from off-shore platform to on-shore distribution and storage. As well as showing the continuum for Oil and Gas production, the sites shown are also, co-incidentally, where location awareness might be required. What might be needed at each of these sites is shown in Table 1 below. Consideration of the type of sites involved reveals some of the issues of scale that need to be considered.
Off-shore, space is at a premium and freedom of movement of personnel constrained, so monitoring choke points across bridges to control POB and at mustering points may suffice. On-shore in refineries, at compressor stations, tank farms, storage sites, etc., location awareness solutions have to perform in greater volumes of free space. This issue is compounded even further where location awareness of personnel is required in relation to, say, a main transmission pipeline.
Figure 1 – Oil & Gas Industry Simplified Schematic
Table 1 – Typical Location Awareness Needs by Site Type
Advantages of electronic location awareness
The primary risks mitigated by location awareness are focussed on removing human error and improving the speed and accuracy of information available in real-time. However, in an increasingly violent world these systems can also be used to provide enhanced security against piracy, terrorism and even kidnap.
A classic example of the former may be gained by considering Statoil who, in 2006, decided to improve emergency preparedness across Statfjord. One key aspect they focused on was a better way to register personnel in an evacuation and keep their Emergency Preparedness Management Team (EPMT) fully updated about an evacuation status in real-time. Following careful evaluation of the conventional ‘paper’ based systems, it was realised that there was room for improvement and a sound business case for adopting an Electronic Personnel Registration System (PRS).
Whilst musters could be achieved within 20 minutes in line with Norwegian legislation using conventional techniques, it was clear this could be challenging in a crisis. Statoil wanted to significantly improve on this and the behaviour of people in a crisis by removing, so far as possible, the human variable and risk of ‘human error’ from mustering. In the event of a crisis they wanted to ensure safety was not compromised through failing to properly account for personnel, so that the search for those missing could take place faster and at the same time prevent the risk of unnecessarily sending rescue teams into a danger zone to find those incorrectly marked as missing through human error. An electronic PRS, not being subject to human error under stress, meant they could rely on the real-time data and counts provided.
Saving Time and Saving Cost
In the Offshore Oil & Gas industry the old adage that "time is money" is particularly true. As Statoil discovered, investing in safety provides business benefits. Manual ‘paper’ based mustering techniques can be time consuming both to administer and generate post-muster reports. An electronic PRS does this automatically providing measurable benefit in this area, with a full history being stored and reports automatically generated at the touch of a button. In addition to providing clear advantages minimising the risk of human error and reducing muster times in a real crisis, it was seen that the PRS would also streamline muster drills, reducing the time required to carry out these necessary exercises by over 50% and allowing personnel to get back to work more rapidly thereby reducing lost man-hours.
A further benefit seen was that the PRS could significantly reduce time – and hence lost production costs – associated with getting production up and running again following an ‘emergency muster’ which would mandatorily require all personnel to be fully accounted for before production could resume.
eLocator™ & eMuster™
We chose S3 ID as it could provide the best technology in mustering combined with proven experience and track recordFollowing careful evaluation of all the options, Statoil selected S3 ID to supply the PRS using RFID technology from our eLocator™ and eMuster™ range. Svein Thorsen of Statoil recently explained:
"We chose S3 ID as it could provide the best technology in mustering combined with proven experience and track record. We were therefore confident of their ability to provide a solution to meet our exacting requirements.
It was also reassuring for Statoil to know the S3 range had been developed from first hand experience serving the on-shore and off-shore Oil & Gas industry. Products are ATEX certified and solutions use patented technology time proven in operation worldwide".
Today S3 ID is an international company providing specialist consultancy services and complete ‘location awareness‘ solutions. We manufacture the market leading S3 range of products which provide proven solutions from personnel and asset tracking, personnel on board (POB), mustering, access control, safety and security to travel logistics management.
The acceptability of location awareness
Fact: Electronic Location Awareness is not about tracking people to spy on them or create an ‘Orwellian’ society – it is about knowing where people are in an emergency to give everyone the best chance of survival.
The precision with which you can ‘locate’ or ‘track’ an individual is largely determined by the situation and technology used. But this can be a contentious issue: In some situations personnel will perceive their movements being monitored by others (who know where they are at all times) as being wholly unacceptable due to a perceived intrusion on personal privacy. However, this perception will vary by their situation and the personal risks involved – and there will be times when those same individuals will actually want others to know where they are at all times for their own safety.
The Four Main Technologies Used Today
We will now consider the merits of the four main technologies in use today.
Swipe Cards
Swipe Cards are perhaps the most widely used location tool, requiring personnel to ‘swipe in’ and ‘swipe out’ at Card Reader points. There are many systems available using swipe cards both to create muster lists and provide access control. The main advantage of this technology is that it is cheap to implement and to issue cards. However, the drawbacks of using this technology in safety applications are that it relies on human intervention, only one person can swipe in at a time (leading to possible delays in an emergency), and that the cards can quickly become worn or dirty, especially in oily atmospheres, which can prevent them from working reliably.
RFID
Passive and Active. Passive tags operate contactlessly but need to be brought into close proximity with the reader to be read and can only be read individually.
Active RFID tags are different. Containing a battery they support increased functionality such as longer life, increased range, and crucially, provide the ability to read multiple tags at once. Active RFID tags typically are provided in either a credit card format worn on a lanyard or as a watch like tag worn on the wrist.
Active RFID provides perhaps the optimum solution for offshore Oil & Gas applications allowing tags to be read as personnel pass choke point antennas on the platform, cross bridge links or arrive at muster points.
As well as providing for automatic control of POB, another offshore application of RFID has recently been installed on an FPSO allowing access control and ‘emergency lockdown’ of the facility when all personnel have reached safety muster points as an anti-piracy precaution.
Ultra Wide Band (UWB)
Providing positional precision of around ½ metre, UWB currently offers the best resolution in real-time location awareness. From the users perspective UWB appears similar to RFID with Intrinsically safe tags typically worn on a lanyard or chest-pocket. Functionally UWB operates in a similar manner to Radar; with a network of sensors set up covering an area. UWB can overcome multi-path errors arising from reflected signals. This technology therefore also works well indoors. A further advantage of UWB is that a person’s location can be monitored in 3D. Coupling this data with appropriate visualisation software can help emergency personnel understand a situation and find a safe route in a crisis. Typical applications for UWB can be found in refineries and compressor station sites.
Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
Most people are familiar with GPS, which provides location information accurate to around 1 metre, calculated by triangulation using a constellation of satellites and highly accurate timing. However, GPS has limitations. It works well out of doors, but can be restricted by tall buildings, dense foliage or when people are inside buildings.
GPS location awareness systems offer the advantage of tracking workers outside of pre-assigned zones. As such GPS could be used to provide enhanced security of personnel on large sites or over large geographic areas. Consider, for example, pipeline workers in remote and troubled regions, where this option could offer peace of mind and a clear starting point for search and recovery, should the worst happen. This additionally has the potential to reduce insurance premiums for employers.
Both GPS and UWB technologies allow both 2D and 3D tracking and real-time display of an individual’s location is also possible. Both technologies also offer the option to generate an alert if some-one is injured and fails to move for a programmable time interval.
Conclusions
Electronic location awareness clearly provides an enhanced level of safety and security for personnel by removing the human risk element (as far as possible) and improves communication leading to an enhanced probability of surviving a disaster. Investing in such technology can also make commercial sense by controlling costs through reducing downtime and lost production resulting from drills or false alarms. It can also potentially mitigate the risk of litigation in a real incident through being seen to ‘have done the right thing’ and can enhance the ‘brand value’ of a business leading to enhanced shareholder value.
Clearly, the best time to plan how you would manage your business in crisis is when you’re not in one.This is particularly important for the Oil & Gas and Energy industries which are always under public scrutiny. The risk of not being prepared to execute a well-planned, integrated response can directly impact on the bottom line of a business and result in damaging consequences to the reputation of the company involved and the industry as a whole. Conversely, well-managed pro-active planning and the appropriate use of location awareness and mustering technology can secure stakeholder confidence and protect your business’s reputation.
This article first appeared in World Pipeline magazine in June 2010.
