Standard Protocols Enhance Cost Savings and Safety Value of Wireless Gas Detection Systems
Detection of methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and other gas leaks, is becoming increasingly critical to gas plant safety and emissions monitoring in the heavily-regulated oil and gas industry. Reducing costs, improving safety and complying with regulations require the ability to monitor hard-to-reach areas and many oil and gas producers are augmenting gas detection capability with wireless instruments because…
Double Your Money with Zirconia Ceramics in Oil and Gas
It goes without saying that crude oil is a valuable, or perhaps more accurately an invaluable product to all of us globally. The unrefined petroleum is pumped from reserves deep underground and by the barrel load, all day, every day. Our dependence on this product (which is processed into a variety of fuel sources and commodities like jet fuel, petrol…
Composite Solutions Improve Midstream Asset Integrity
Keeping pipelines operating safely and efficiently is critical to the world economy, so diligent maintenance and effective repairs are critical for the millions of miles of lines transporting oil and gas around the world. While traditional repairs often are the first choice, they are not always the most effective or cost-effective options. Many standard repairs require hot work and other…
In the world of industrial automation, the talk is centered around IIOT. With buzzwords like “Industry 4.0,” “IOT,” “digital twin,” “cloud computing,” “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning,” and “deep learning,” it is difficult for automation engineers and business managers to determine how to implement these new technologies. The purpose of this article is to define a practical approach to using IOT…
Letter from the Publisher (January-February 2020)
Investors and banks have indicated they are cutting back on investing and lending money to the booming shale market. Financial firm’s site the reason for the funding cutback is shale companies are producing less than forecasted and their reserves are less than anticipated. Shale producers receive funding based on the value of reserves, which are held for collateral. The pullback…
Spinning Straw into Gold: Using Expertise to Leverage Your Data and Gain Insight into Your Business
Leveraging data, analytics and relying on the expertise of your team can unlock new insights into your business and supply chain. Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. The Board sets a growth target for the upcoming year. The deal team is assembled from a cross-functional section of the business. They’re on the prowl for the best asset(s), looking…
“If you want the good stuff (performance), then you have to use the bad stuff.” This has been a long-standing slogan in the oilfield production chemicals business, referring to the use of synthetic chemistries. The meaning of it? Chemicals that performed the best were also some of the most toxic and environmentally harmful products to use—resulting in a difficult choice…
Reuse of Well Production Water from Oil and Gas Wells
Water is one of the most important resources on the planet. Composed by two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, it represents a renewable resource as long as the procedures of treatment, filtration and conversion are respected, otherwise it would be considered as a non-renewable one. The water produced from oil wells has different uses, they can be separated…
New CAM Software Boosts Production, Saves Time and Money for Houston Seismic Equipment Maker
For the oil industry, efficiently finding and developing hydrocarbon resources is essential. In the ongoing search for new energy reserves, seismic data acquisition has emerged as one of the petroleum industry’s most reliable and commonly used technologies for finding subsurface oil and gas deposits. And the need for accurate and cost-effective seismic data acquisition technology continues to grow. GeoSpace Technologies,…
America’s Energy: 2020 and Beyond
As stated in my book, America Needs America’s Energy: Creating Together the People’s Energy Plan, “Future generations are depending on us to keep the American dream alive. For too long we in America have been wasting time blaming the energy industry or the government for failure to adopt a national energy strategy, when we should be responsible for creating the…
Enhancing Safety and Operability in the Evolving STS Transfer Market
Ship-to-ship (STS) transfer is becoming increasingly common throughout the shipping industry. It has been an important part of the oil industry for some time, providing the logistical backbone for large swathes of the global oil trade, but STS transfers in oil have become even more important of late. This rising prominence of STS transfers across the maritime industry is evidenced…
Here is a look back at some quotes from The Crude Life in 2019 that deserve another look and listen. “It is confusing and gets more confusing when we talk about 9,100 barrels of oil released and that’s equivalent to 383,000 gallons, sometimes the reporters mix gallons and barrels together and those are two different units. The hard thing is…
Kicking off a New Year, a new decade and in Oil and Gas – an exciting time of making deals happen! Of course, I work in the off-market acquisitions space, and there are a lot of plans that will take shape in 2020 over the entire industry. At Beachwood, we are seeing a significant amount of assets shift from “not…
Project Controls Software Fuels Digitization for Oil and Gas Companies
The oil and gas industry is no stranger to uncertainty, but with incongruity of supply and demand, organizations have found a game changer in getting better margins through efficiency rather than overproduction. The companies in the industry that are coming out on top are those who are embracing digitization (the automation of existing manual and/or paper-based processes). While collecting, analyzing…
“Customer first. Our people always.” TechnipFMC’s stated philosophy isn’t just a passing nod to the Experience Economy, it’s an indication of the company’s wholehearted embrace of a business strategy suited to the post-commoditized oil and gas industry, where profitability is connected to a company’s ability to deliver an elevated experience to customers and employees. A subsea, onshore/offshore and surface project-management…
Feature Podcast: Oil and Gas 2020 Market Outlook
We all want to possess the ability to predict the future. This is something we covered in a previous feature article on artificial intelligence and it applies here, but in a slightly different way. The start of a new year brings new things, a little of the unexpected. The unknown brings with it some apprehension because when you’re talking about…
