Zedi
Full-Stack IIoT-as-a-Service

The choppy waters that oil and gas companies have sailed through for the last two years have now calmed, and digitalization and industrial internet of things implementation have become top pressure points for CIOs. The objectives are pretty clear in the upstream segment— monitoring the type and quantity of production and keeping a close watch on the operating parameters of distributed asset bases. The path to achieving these objectives, however, is a challenging one. The know-how required for successful IIoT implementation tends to be outside of an oil and gas firm’s forte. In order to provide an easy alternative, Zedi—an expert at IIoT infrastructures—offers IIoT-as-a-Service in an outsourced model. Zedi enables oil and gas organizations to stream sensor-sourced data from their upstream facilities and asset base through Zedi’s cloud-based IIoT infrastructure.

In the upstream Oil & Gas industry, after a well is completed, the asset enters its production operations life-cycle. One way to think about an individual well is to model it as a chemical manufacturing process or ‘assembly line’ producing hydrocarbons. Companies can have hundreds of these ‘assembly lines’ supporting the hydrocarbon ‘manufacturing process’ scattered over thousands of square miles. “There is also a need to gain visibility into the lifecycle and operating conditions of a widely distributed asset base consisting of wells, lift-assist mechanisms, tanks, compressors, separators and other assets throughout the upstream gathering system,” states James Freeman, CTO and president of New Ventures at Zedi. Zedi has implemented nearly 1.5 million sensors that generate almost 50 million data points daily, providing a complete picture of the health of the underlying equipment as well as the production volume and type of hydrocarbons produced.

Zedi’s IIoT sensors collect a wide range of time-series plots of temperature, pressure, and volumetric flow of hydrocarbon fluids, and, depending on the equipment present, battery voltages, vibration, RPM, and power consumption of equipment may also be reported. Data aggregated from these points are processed in a predefined workflow in Zedi’s platform.

The insights are published in pre-populated dashboards with insights that are meaningful to the different roles in an operations team, like field operators, foremen, production engineers, measurement coordinators, and production accountants. Zedi Access^TM, a web-based platform secured by ISO 27002 best practices, provides these individualized insights in an intuitive and rich interface. Zedi also offers a scaled down version—Zedi Go—that provides features that personnel on the go require. Zedi Access^TM enables push notifications, emails, and text messages, based on pre-defined alarms and escalation practices for different events. Concerned user profiles are alerted regarding events in the production environment or assets in real-time.

The value of reducing costs and increasing output in an environment with distributed assets that support a production process can be replicated to other similar industries

Freeman notes that the virtue of Zedi’s technology lies in the fact that their customers can learn about a potential problem faster, diagnose quickly, and assemble appropriate resources at the well site to mitigate issues and prevent downtime. By automating the supervision of wells and reducing on-site manpower, Zedi significantly reduces the operating cost per barrel for customers.

“The value of reducing costs and increasing output in an environment with distributed assets that support a production process can be replicated to other similar industries,” says Freeman. As Zedi intends to enter new industries and geographies, Freeman notes that the corporate perseverance and resilience Zedi has in continuing to sell to the Oil & Gas industry despite the most recent down-turn, is key to pivoting into new industries like Agriculture, Food Services, and Renewable Energy, all of which also have distributed asset bases supporting a manufacturing process.