Wellhead monitoring

Viasat's IoT Pro and IoT Select services are built upon our trusted L-band satellite network that offers up to 99.9% network availability. They’re well-suited to the monitoring and control of assets and infrastructure in remote locations around the world.

Our robust and lightweight hardware works seamlessly with various applications such as remote terminal management, debugging and configuration options, enabling real-time surveillance to help ensure the safety and efficiency of production.

The challenge

Amid increasing pressure to cut costs and enhance efficiency, wellhead monitoring has become vital for the oil and gas industry. Wellheads serve as the interface for drilling and production equipment, impacting production efficiency over a well's lifespan.

Wellhead performance data helps in predicting maintenance needs, allowing for planned downtime, and avoiding revenue loss. Optimal equipment function also helps prevent accidents like explosions and leaks, reducing health, safety, and environmental damage. Being able to prevent pollution also helps save operators from having to pay hefty fines.

However, sending engineers out to travel long distances to visit sites and physically assess wellheads is time-consuming, inefficient, and potentially puts people at risk. Automated monitoring has clear advantages here, but due to the often-remote locations of reservoirs, cellular service can be limited. That used to mean that costly infrastructure would need to be installed to provide the necessary connectivity for it to work. That is, unless oil and gas companies turn to satellite connectivity to plug the gaps..

Our solution

This solution is comprised of leading wireless wellhead sensors from Viasat’s partners, backhauled by Viasat’s IoT connectivity services, IoT Pro or IoT Select, on our L-band network. Our network provides military-grade safety and security as well as outstanding reliability. Its robust capabilities operate even in adverse weather conditions, such as heavy rain, and is applicable to a range of different wellhead scenarios.

A typical situation would be an oilfield service company operating over a large land area, requiring constant multipoint monitoring and real-time data to improve production and significantly reduce downtime.

Benefits

• Minimize unplanned downtime: Avoid unplanned downtime and minimize the spend on emergency repairs to aging equipment and revenue loss.
• Reduce time and cost of monitoring wellheads: Remote monitoring reduces the need for workers and teams to travel to monitor conditions — potentially saving thousands on the average cost of such work.
• Lower environmental impact and resulting fines: Using satellite-enabled IoT to monitor and predictively maintain wellheads not only helps to prevent accidents and protect the environment, but it could also potentially save organizations from hefty fines for damages.

Features

• Real-time monitoring: Access wellhead data to diagnose performance issues in real time.
• Overcome the Middle East's connectivity divide: Sensors can be deployed to wellheads with unreliable or non-existent terrestrial connectivity.
• Reduce costs: Fully optimized IoT gateway for use with satellite and wellhead monitoring sensors keeps system costs low.
• Easy set-up: Quick and easy to deploy, with compact form factor.
• Self-powered: Solar panels ensure no dependency on mains power when selecting an installation.
• Rugged construction: Built to withstand the toughest natural environments, with a proven track record of deployment in extreme conditions.