New Consortium Seeks RFID Standard for Oil, Gas Industries

By Mary Catherine O'Connor

July 22, 2008—Retail, supply chain, health care…now add petroleum production to the list of industries turning to RFID technology solutions for operational improvements and competitive advantage. A number of leading petroleum companies have joined with RFID vendors and a think tank comprised of professors and researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of Houston to form the Oil & Gas RFID Solution Group.

The consortium's goal is to develop a common approach to deploying RFID across the oil and gas industry. This will entail creating best practices for such RFID applications as tracking and maintaining oil-drilling components, as well as a standard RFID tag-numbering scheme, protocols and form factors.

Professor Ben Zoghi

The group is working closely with RFID standard-setting organization EPCglobal to create a passive RFID tag standard for the industry. It also aims to create standards for using active RFID tags with integrated sensors to monitor environmental conditions at drilling sites, to ensure optimal machinery operation and soil chemistry.

The RFID vendors involved in the project are hardware manufacturers Avery Dennison and Motorola, software provider Shipcom Wireless and Merlin Concepts and Technology, a systems integrator focused on the oil and gas industry.

The petroleum companies involved in the project have not yet been revealed. However, says Konrad Konarski, a founding member of the Oil & Gas Solution Group and VP of Merlin Concepts and Technology, these firms have already begun work on a number of proof-of-concept projects in which passive RFID is employed to track assets or sensor-based tags used to monitor environmental conditions.