Mobile technology seen as critical in disasters: Current oil spill showing advantages of M2M

Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from RCR Wireless News’ May Special Edition, “Enabling the Mobile Revolution: Mobile Chips, Devices and Accessories.” The 80-page special edition is available here.
The British Petroleum plc oil disaster which resulted from the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion that killed 11 platform workers and injured 17 others is thought to be one of the largest oil spills the world has ever seen, with tens of millions of gallons spilled to date.
The oil slick already covers at least 2,500 square miles, fluctuating from day to day depending on weather conditions. Scientists have also reported immense underwater plumes of oil not visible at the surface and over 400 species which live in the vicinity of the spill are said to be at risk.
Oceanographer John Kessler has said that the crude gushing from the well contains 40% methane, compared to about 5% found in typical oil deposits. Methane is a natural gas that could potentially suffocate marine life and create “dead zones” where oxygen is so depleted that nothing lives. “This is the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history,” Kessler said.
Recently, Peter Hartwell an engineer from computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co. told the audience at the firm’s Executive Energy Conference in Dubai he believed intelligent sensor technology deployed on oil rigs and other drilling equipment could have prevented the disaster had they been installed, and that certainly in the future, such measures should be taken to avoid a repeat of the disaster.
Indeed, HP foresees a future where a trillion connected sensors could potentially provide real-time information for a multitude of monitoring applications, spanning various vertical markets as well as the oil and gas industry.
HP says it is already working with oil giant, Royal Dutch Shell plc, to get its sensor vision underway, with the two firms collaborating on a wireless sensing system which collects seismic data to aid drilling and exploration.
While we will probably never know whether technology could have played a better role preventing a disaster of this catastrophic magnitude, the cellular industry is taking one mantra to heart: “There’s no point in crying over spilled oil, instead we have to do our best to help clean it up,” RCR was told by an industry insider.
Indeed, the cleanup itself is proving to be a task of enormous proportions and complexity, with BP’s estimates at time of print totaling $2.65 billion in costs and only 435,000 barrels of oil recovered from the nearly 60,000 barrels a day which continues to seep into the sea.
Like most disaster recovery efforts, the most vital components of any salvage plan are speed and coordination, efficiently controlled by a command center with access and oversight over all field data. Of course, this would be a utopic situation, and bears no resemblance to the BP clean-up efforts thus far.
Instead of knowing where assets are deployed and how quickly it can coordinate those assets to assist with the cleanup, BP seems to be spending more of its time grappling with command overlap issues, as the national Coast Guard, Navy and local emergency response teams all seemingly do their own thing, answering to their own chain of command.
Such a public/private response has thus far proven inept at coordinating efforts properly, because total visibility of assets is not controlled through one central source.
According to Craig Montgomery, senior VP of marketing and business development for remote asset management and trailer tracking service SkyBitz, “We must ask the questions: Is there a clear situational analysis that tells you where every response vehicle is along the coast? Do they know where each fishing boat currently under contract to assist in cleanup is, and can they coordinate its efforts with the other? Are response efforts hindered in bringing more assets to bear simply because they cannot track and coordinate them?”All excellent questions BP probably wishes it had the answers to.
Place for M2M
Montgomery, however, believes there are answers to those questions, and they lie in machine-to-machine technology, which refers to technologies that allow both wireless and wired systems to communicate with other devices of the same ability.
M2M uses a device (sensor, meter, etc.) to capture an “event” (temperature, inventory level, etc.), which is relayed through a network (wireless, wired or hybrid) to an application (software program), that translates the captured event into meaningful information through the use of telemetry, which is the language machines use when in communication with each other.
“Most of these rigs have fairly complex monitoring technologies already. But, even those can fail when it comes to human intervention or interpretation, which appears to be the case with the BP oil disaster,” Montgomery told RCR, adding that in this situation or those like it, M2M technology could play two key roles.
“First, devices can be deployed to monitor pressure, flow, etc.; independent of the existing onboard technology,” he said explaining that these devices could act as a “canary in the coalmine” and report any serious exception (e.g. a threshold exceeded, etc) to persons who are not on the rig itself.
“M2M devices that can run unpowered and unmanned could play a significant role in helping alert folks of the telltale signs of disaster,” Montgomery alleged, noting that M2M could create another channel for effective risk abatement.
The second way M2M can play a role, says Montgomery, is in the response process after the disaster. “Unfortunately, disasters will happen. The question is how you mitigate collateral damage as fast as possible in a situation such as this. M2M can play a very effective role in the speed and effectiveness of response efforts that usually consist of very disparate entities,” he posited.
When it comes to the larger implications of the explosion and resulting oil spill, Montgomery noted wistfully, “time is not your friend.” There were, he explained, no dedicated crews (public or private sector) standing at the ready to handle the response to such a spill. “The coordination of these disparate assets and mitigating the flow of the spill that ultimately can have the greatest impact is the most important,” he said.
SkyBitz itself has various technologies it says could be used to prevent and react to serious situations, from protecting the shipment of arms, ammunitions and explosives or the theft of fuel from tankers, or the detection of intrusion in a shipping container.
“Our devices combined with various sensors have the ability to monitor assets for up to five years on a set of eight AA batteries,” he proudly proclaimed, adding that the owners of these assets monitor the situations from hundreds to thousands of miles away through SkyBitz’s Insight web service – via the firm’s near real-time reporting feature and two-way satellite communications network.
“Our service can also provide XML data feeds over HTTP and HTTPS,” Montgomery explained. “Delivery is fully automated and can be embedded in any client application. And because we operate on a two-way communications platform, push and pull mechanisms can be supported for both reporting and device configuration needs.”
Satellite view
Meanwhile global satellite communications company, Iridium Communications Inc., developer of satellite transceivers that allow customers to monitor and transmit data to and from any location on Earth within seconds, says several of its clients have also embedded its short burst data modems into their applications to transmit data in real-time for oil spill cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. These include MetOcean, Louisiana based, Sasco
Inc. and Mariah Shrimp, both of which are using Iridium’s technology in rather novel ways.
MetOcean has designed three different drifting buoys currently being used down in the Gulf of Mexico. The first, “iSphere” specifically tracks and monitors the oil spill. The second, “SLDMB” is a search and rescue type drifter which can be used to track oil and is deployed out of a plane or helicopter, making it ideal for timely response in these types of high-stress situations. The third is the “iSVP” drifting buoy, used to track sub-surface ocean current at specified depths to track sub-surface oil plumes.
Meanwhile, industrial wholesale supplier Sasco has designed an Iridium-based satellite tracking unit that has been stationed on a shrimp trawler called the “Dusty James” owned by Mariah Shrimp of Louisiana. Mariah Shrimp owns a boat that has been chartered by the organizations involved in the Gulf clean-up to scoop up oil around the mouth of the Mississippi.
On the prevention side, Iridium told RCR Wireless News it was also working with Fastwave Communications and Chevron Corp. to come up with better marine environmental monitoring applications. Thus far, Fastwave has developed the OceanStar system, already in use by Australia’s Woodside Energy’s Pluto project and Chevron’s Gorgon project for water quality monitoring programs. Chevron uses the solution to monitor turbidity levels arising from dredging and spoil operations in waters near its gas processing plant location on Barrow Island.
Logistics critical
Needless to say, it certainly appears that M2M could have done much to lessen the horrific and ever growing disaster still seeping into the Gulf, as well as many other disasters natural or otherwise. If one looks back at most big disasters in recent history, the speed and effective coordination of the response is usually what makes the difference between a minor disaster and a major disaster. The government, of course, bears a huge responsibility for managing a wide range of assets scattered around the disaster theater as part of its mission to react and respond, but the situation is often an amalgamation of private and public first responder assets, as well as volunteers such as fishing and shrimp boats.
Critical assets like trailers full of perishable goods, buses for evacuees, generators and other unmanned equipment often reside in remote or disparate locations before an emergency – making them difficult to locate, track and navigate into a disaster theater.
Executives like Montgomery note that better M2M tracking would ensure much greater flexibility to adapt through improved asset location, tracking, navigation and communications while also delivering holistic reporting for maximum situational awareness.
Also important, says Montgomery, is to have a hardware agnostic system via an adaptable API, asset tracking devices which can operate without power for several years, extremely accurate, robust in-transit visibility/reporting and ubiquitous satellite coverage.
Asset tracking devices, claims Montgomery, run for just a few hundred dollars, with messaging costs that can range from $10 to $20 dollars a month – a veritable pittance if compared to the mass spending BP is using to try and plug the leak and clean up its mess. Many of these devices can be installed in half an hour to an hour and can run without any power source for years, he said.
“There is no reason that within hours every public safety and private sector asset brought into the disaster theater should not have an asset tracking device attached to it,” Montgomery concluded.
After all, better late than never.