By Elizabeth Wasserman

Nov. 30, 2009—Hundreds of offshore rigs populate the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, the Persian Gulf and other bodies of water to keep the world supplied with energy. The rigs are like industrial towns at sea that house the workers and the myriad items they need to live there, as well as the tools and equipment required to drill wells in the ocean floor, extract oil or natural gas, and transport the product back to shore. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to operate each rig. If one essential part breaks or is misplaced and no replacement arrives in the next regularly scheduled ferry container shipment, a rig can be forced to halt production.

"As one vice president of an energy company told me, 'If we lose something, FedEx doesn't deliver 50 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico,'" says John Rommel, senior manager of RFID channel development for Motorola. As a result, companies sometimes have to hire helicopters to transport just one item out to a rig, at a cost of several thousand dollars per trip.

Nabors Canada, a land-drilling product and services provider, RFID-tags assets to manage and maintain its equipment.

Keeping rigs operating 24 hours a day is one reason many leading-edge drill and exploration companies are deploying RFID to track products from their distribution centers in Louisiana seaports, which service 90 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's oil production, to various deep-sea and inland oil platforms. RFID can ensure that the right containers stocked with the correct supplies—from toilet paper and soap to pumps and tools—are sent to the designated rigs. In addition, the U.S. government requires a manifest be created for each shipment and container delivered to these platforms, something RFID technology can generate automatically.