Leaders from the Canadian oil and gas industry are set to speak with a large number of players in the IoT space to discuss innovative solutions to the industry’s issues, with the event scheduled for Feb. 13 at Hotel Arts in Calgary.
The event – which is being put on by The Alberta IoT Association in partnership with Techterra and Rogers Communications – will see challenges posed to the attendees with an opportunity for the two sides to discuss those challenges.
Mark Scantlebury, chairperson of the Alberta IoT Association, said three of the biggest challenges they plan to address include the geographic dispersing of assets, the required periodic or constant monitoring of assets, and the high costs of the technology.
“A good example would be monitoring the thousands of kilometres of pipelines and looking for very small leaks. This is typically done with aircraft that has a gas detector built into it. In some of the cases where the pipelines are carrying oil, the challenge is even greater because there is no gas present. This typically requires humans to drive/walk to the pipeline,” explained Scantlebury in an email to IT World Canada. “An IoT solution would add electronic monitoring that would send the data to a central repository in the cloud, analyzing the data and making it available to operations staff in a control room or out in the field.”
When asked if Alberta IoT supports alternative energy sources as vehemently as they support the oil and gas industry, Scantlebury said that they are “industry independent” and explained that they have events in other industries planned for the near future and touted the transferability of the technology, no matter the industry.
“The neat thing is that a lot of IoT technology is directly transferrable between industries, which will help diversify the Alberta economy,” he said. “We are building up relationships with a number of players in different industries, but that is an ongoing process.”
