When you think of the oil and gas industry, the first thing that comes to many people’s minds are the disasters that have happened over the years, such as on Deepwater Horizon.
These disasters not only cost companies billions of dollars and have a devastating impact on the environment; human lives are lost.
Oil and gas supermajor, Total, didn’t want their legacy to be one of environmental decimation and the loss of human life. To ensure this doesn’t happen, Total created the TADI (Total Anomaly Detection Initiative) group to explore opportunities in next-generation technologies for major accident prevention.
Total needed to be able to react to a potentially dangerous situation (such as a gas leak) immediately and be able to evolve their application as new infrastructure and technologies are added to the system. After realizing that developing an in-house solution (by piecing together multiple technologies) would take far too long and would not provide the agility necessary to protect human life in the high risk environment of an oil and gas operation, Total began searching for a next-generation application development platform.
The main goal for Total’s TADI project is to prevent major accidents and save human lives. By developing their application on Vantiq’s real-time platform Total is able to integrate many different technologies (GPS tracking of workers, thermal imagery, acoustic sensors, etc.) to paint a real-time picture of their oil and gas operations. This allows Total to recognize minor issues before they become major problems.
As past disasters in the oil and gas industry have shown, the damage caused extends much farther than the cost of damaged infrastructure. The environmental fallout can have an impact for centuries to come and human lives are almost always lost in these disasters. By moving to a real-time approach, the risk of a catastrophic event occurring is decreased and if such an event does occur, egress procedures are in place to ensure no human lives are lost.
This also has benefits to the bottom line, as fewer accidents and injuries mean less legal costs and infrastructure repair.
Most of the time, equipment doesn’t go from working 100% to complete failure immediately. By using a wide array of smart sensors and streaming the data into Vantiq, operators are immediately alerted of deviations from a set threshold and can choose the best course of action to prevent a major accident.