Tech Update: Oil & Gas Industry Explores RFID

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

Adoption of RFID in the oil and gas sector has been relatively slow for several reasons: tag cost, reliability of the technology in harsh environments, and tag performance in applications where there are large quantities of both metal and liquids. With sharp reductions in price and the improvement of on-metal RFID performance, a number of companies have deployed RFID to improve operations and reduce supply chain risk. "The supply chains within these segments are very asset-intensive; critical assets are distributed over a vast network of remote sites, many in challenging, hard-toreach environments," says Terence Leung, director of market management at Savi Technology. "Asset and shipment location/status/ condition tracking, compliance enablement, and personnel management are some of the areas where oil and gas owners/operators and equipment and service providers have tried out localized solutions or are looking at deploying more broadly."