The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has been fueling digital transitions for nearly every global industry. The oil and gas sector is no exception either.

However, to say that the oil and gas industry has started to adopt digitization only recently would be wrong. Truth be told, a digital headwind surged over the industry in the 1990s and the early part of the century, but unfortunately, failed to change the face of it. For the most part, enterprises were ignorant of the range of opportunities that data could offer if used meaningfully.

Cut to present, the oil and gas industry has reached the cusp of an unprecedented digital boom. It’s riding high on the IIoT wave and leveraging its growth to an extent that it might outwit other capital-intensive industries in the process. Below are five ways in which IIoT is revolutionizing the oil and gas industry, and cementing its foundation to compete in the hydra digital-first world.

Creating a Collaborative Ecosystem

IIoT adoption has opened new and advanced frontiers of collaborative innovation for the oil and gas industry. The introduction of integrated digital platforms has fostered an ecosystem where strategic communications no longer sit in silos, rather travel across workstreams to help enterprises enhance collaboration and ensure factory visibility at scale. Integrating an all-access information layer for cross-functional units helps enterprises bear the fruits of competitive benefits, including maximized innovation, strategic decision making, and reduced costs.

Further, creating an IIoT-driven collaborative ecosystem also propagates the concept of Connected Workers in the organizations. Employees using smartphones, wearables, and other connected devices execute tasks with safety and efficiency while harnessing the power of real-time insights. This contributes to building workplace resilience with enhanced performance and auditability, deriving sustained business value out of massively diverse operations.

Production and Capital Throughput

The proliferation of IIoT in the oil and gas industry has greatly increased production throughput and efficiency, while also enhancing safety and taming overhead costs. The use of wireless sensors and automated monitoring systems, responsible for acquiring, analyzing, and organizing data, have been instrumental in enabling this performance acceleration.

Using real-time data, enterprises are increasingly capable of gaining end-to-end visibility into their on-ground processes, determining qualitative as well as quantifiable understanding around their asset and performance maturity, and making informed decisions to improve field operations.

Equipment and Asset Management

IIoT implementation has made it easier for the enterprises to determine the serviceable life of the assets and reconfigure them to avoid performance downtimes. Since sensors continually monitor each functional wheel for anomalies and relay data to maintenance teams, organizations can respond faster to any imminent glitch that might throw stability in flux, thereby ensuring continuous delivery and with impact.

Remote Performance Monitoring

Given the extensive, multi-location footprint of oil and gas companies, there is always a critical yet daunting need to evaluate asset performance remotely for efficiency, safety, and maintenance needs. Contrary to isolated, unconnected factories of the past, the new-age IIoT-led enterprises have transformed the upstream operations using the sensors and remote controlled devices. These technologies monitor remote assets in real-time, communicate performance data across a common information layer, and help service teams better understand on-ground operations. Metrics, such as pressure and temperature are tracked to monitor the shop floor habitats and are further compared to determine the maximum outputs and operational lags if any.

Preventive Maintenance

So far, it’s apparently clear that performance tracking is central to IIoT’s disruptive agenda. Oil and gas companies can examine data to quickly locate the areas of trouble, fix them, and keep things in the usual order. However, IIoT isn’t only helpful in transforming the present, but also in predicting the future. In IIoT’s terms, the process is referred to as Preventive Maintenance, where data insights are used to analyze the infrastructural health and predict problems and failures that might put the operations under stress.

Preventive Maintenance help enterprises spot anomalies in the asset and equipment usage beforehand and initiate pre-emptive action to control damage. Given this, organizations find themselves in a win-win position, where they are able to develop bespoke counteractive strategies for every fault they detect and keep workflows stable. Ultimately, this results in improved efficiency, reliability and reduced operational costs.

Getting Started with IIoT in the Oil and Gas Industry

Optima is proof of Kellton razor-sharp IoT competencies. This is a powerful IoT-enabled AI platform for the oil and gas industry that collates data from various sources to provide seamless end-to-end enterprise visibility and enable processes that are streamlined, productive, and cost-effective. It also provides effective field operations management and monitoring of all resources and assets, enabling smooth workflow and process automation. Optima enable the management to take real-time decisions by leveraging IoT and cutting-edge domain driven analytics.