Jun 23, 2016When building pipelines or digging oil wells in harsh climates and environmentally sensitive areas, construction crews need temporary roads that will allow them to operate their equipment safely and efficiently, without sinking into the mud. This means they need mats—lots of mats, which are typically made of wood or, sometimes, plastic composite. The mats each measure roughly 8 feet wide, 14 feet long and 6 inches thick, and weigh approximately a ton. They can be assembled to create a road strong enough to keep heavy construction equipment from bogging down, and prevent the ground and plants from being torn up.
"Mats protect things above and below," says Steve Fisher, CEO of Golden Environmental Mat (GEM) Services, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The 16-person mat-rental company provides a little-known but vital service to the energy industry.
A typical job uses 2,000 to 5,000 mats, and "the big complaint was that nobody could actually keep track of them," Fisher says. "You'd have guys in machinery counting them, writing the numbers down and then submitting bunches of pieces of paper at the end of the day." Inaccuracies were unavoidable. And some mats would inevitably sink into the mud and disappear from sight, resulting in what the industry calls "mat abandonment."
Before Fisher and his business partner, George Otcenasek, founded GEM Services in 2011, they conducted a market survey and the results confirmed the matting industry faced many problems. "We wanted to enter a business that needed a major improvement," Fisher says, "and we felt certain modern technology could alleviate the problems." Once their company was open for business, they began researching RFID options for tracking their wood mats.
In 2013, Fisher discovered an even bigger problem than miscounted or sunk-in-the-mud mats—misidentified mats. GEM had delivered mats to a job site, which was also using mats from both the client company and another rental service. At the end of the project, GEM was missing CAN$100,000 (US$78,100) worth of mats. Each mat is worth roughly CAN$750 (US$586).
Both the client company and the other mat supplier denied taking any GEM mats, Fisher says. "They said, 'How can you prove this happened?' and we couldn't," he recalls. "All mats look the same once they're covered with mud." GEM had no choice but to write off those mats. "That was a major, major loss," he says. "So that motivated us, as pain does, and got us going on finding a solution."
In 2015, GEM introduced SmartMat, an RFID solution that tracks tagged mats with readers installed in the heavy equipment the company uses to move them. GEM's primary motivation in introducing RFID was to better manage its inventory, and indeed using RFID eliminated both mat abandonment and any conflicts over mat ownership.
But the move has also brought welcome benefits to the environment in one of the world's wildest areas. These include a reduction in burning fossil fuels, a major contributor to global warming, and a new system that helps heavy equipment operators comply with environmental best practices, protecting delicate areas and reducing the spread of plant diseases such as clubroot. "There are a few big wins for the environment," Fisher says.
Getting Unstuck
Fisher knew developing an RFID mat-tracking solution wasn't going to be easy. "Always, the big problem was readability, because mats go down in mud and water," he says. "Sometimes they're fully submerged." GEM needed a solution that would allow mats to be identified when sunk in mud and completely waterlogged, and in harsh weather that could see a hot summer day followed by a snowy night. The company also wanted to compete in the much larger U.S. market, which meant GEM needed a solution that could track mats whether they were face up or down. Canadian mats have a right side and wrong side up.
There was no off-the-shelf solution to meet these requirements, so GEM turned to the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT), in Calgary, for design help. "Mats tend to soak up a lot of moisture, so trying to find a place where we could put RFID tags and still give them a 10-foot read range was our No. 1 priority," says Glen Kathler, a research associate in charge of SAIT's RFID Application Development Lab.
GEM presented SAIT with two other challenges, Kathler adds. The company wanted to RFID-tag the 10,000 mats it already had and, in the future, work with suppliers to RFID-tag mats during manufacture. So SAIT devised a solution for inserting EPC Gen 2 passive ultrahigh-frequency tags in mats.
With tag design solved, the next hurdle was coming up with a way to read the tagged mats. In addition to SAIT, the project team included Steve Reid, an in-house technology lead, executives from Tesera Systems, a Canadian software solutions provider, which developed the mobile software, and representatives from SensorUp, which which helped connect GEM's mobile software to hardware in remote environments. They began experimenting with handheld readers, which turned out to be highly impractical for use at sprawling job sites. Then, they mounted an RFID reader and antenna in the company's pickup truck and drove to job sites to read mats. But this approach wasn't efficient, either, because mats are transported by large trucks and set in place and removed by heavy equipment. Pickup trucks are not part of the process. "It dawned on us," Fisher recalls, "that we needed to use our own heavy equipment."
GEM worked with SAIT to RFID-enable the vehicles the company uses to move mats, including wheel loaders, excavators and a giant arm, similar to the robotic Canadarm on the International Space Station, which can pick up a mat in its "fingers." They installed Impinj Speedway Revolution R420 readers in the cabs. For read accuracy, they determined the optimal placements for MTI Wireless Edge linear antennas and Laird circular polarized antennas, including on the cab, within the vehicle's wheels or tread and on the mechanical arm, which can extend as far as 15 feet.
GEM also installed Trimble Yuma 2 tablets inside the cabs, which work well with the Impinj readers and Laird antennas, Fisher says. The tablets provide a dashboard for the equipment operators and use GPS to record the exact location of each mat every time its tags are read.
"We offer clients a log-in to our dashboard to view project maps, trucking information, mat types and grades, contamination information, mat inventories in use and available, and of course mat locations," Fisher says. The software will also provide reports on any or all of this data so clients can track trends over time or see how a particular project is performing.
GEM field-tested the solution for three months, during which time it corrected hardware and software issues. Every piece of heavy equipment GEM uses, whether rented or owned, is now RFID-enabled and has GPS capabilities. The tagged mats are installed on a project while needed, then either returned to a GEM storage location or moved to the next project.
A Clean View
Since 2015, GEM has used the SmartMat solution to monitor mats on several projects in remote areas of Alberta. On those projects, there has been no incidence of mat abandonment. Operators used combined RFID and GPS data to identify a mat's location before it disappeared from view, so they could use equipment to feel around in the mud for the missing mat and retrieve it. The company now has a clear and accurate view of its inventory. And—in case the question ever arises again—it also has a foolproof way to prove ownership of its mats on every job site.
GEM is also seeing unexpected efficiency gains and lower costs. "We thought we were just keeping track of inventory, but we found the bigger value is keeping track of the overall project," Fisher says. GEM software keeps a record of exactly what time and where each mat is read. "We can see for, say, a particular excavator, how much time it touches each mat and where there are gaps," Fisher explains. "If it's not touching a mat for a long period, that's down time. Either that machinery is moving somewhere, which is fine, or it's sitting around waiting for mats to arrive, which is not fine. We can tell we have an access problem, or we may not have enough trucks out there, which is a big problem."
A lot of the work transporting GEM mats from one location to another is subcontracted to trucking companies. Here, too, RFID provides valuable insight into operations. If, for example, two trucks are dispatched to a job site 20 minutes apart—but the RFID data indicates one truck moved its mats several hours after the other truck —GEM's owners know to ask why the second truck was delayed. Those conversations have led to efficiency improvements on the part of the trucking companies, Fisher says.
SmartMat also shows that sustainability and profit go hand in hand. Having an accurate record of every mat's location has cut down dramatically on the need to transport the mats long distances, which, in turn, reduces fuel costs and harmful fuel emissions. "It's knowing you have mats stored 100 miles away from a project rather than fetching them from another location 200 miles away," Fisher explains.
Knowing the mats' locations also improves customer service. "There will be mats out on a project not being used," Fisher says. "It's as far out in the middle of nowhere as you can imagine and these are very large sites, so quite often they get forgotten. So customers will be phoning us asking for mats when they have mats already there that are available." With the RFID record, GEM executives can reply, "We have some in the back corner of your site," he says.
SmartMat delivers other green benefits. The tablet dashboards alert operators when they are entering environmentally sensitive areas and should either leave or take extra precautions. Previously, this information was contained in paper documents several hundred pages long. Operators might not remember all the necessary precautions or know the exact locations of protected areas.
The RFID solution also facilitates compliance with Alberta's Agricultural Pests Act, which includes controlling clubroot by practicing good sanitation. Mats that have been in infected areas must be washed and decontaminated before they are moved to another location. Because SmartMat gives GEM a verifiable record of exactly where each mat has been, the company has been able to cut back on the labor and expense of washing mats on a long-distance project such as a pipeline. "We've gone from washing 100 percent of our mats to about 75 percent," Fisher says.
The company is partnering with a mat-washing facility that will incorporate RFID to track mats when they enter and exit the wash. "As mats roll through the mat-washing machine, we will scan them before they enter the conveyer," he says. "They go through a multistep process that uses steam and bleach to decontaminate the mat, then we scan them again as they roll out afterward. This way we can monitor which mat was decontaminated at exactly what time, which really helps with client liabilities." It also adds redundancy when capturing this critically important data, he says.
In the near future, GEM's mats may have a second life as an energy source. Mats have a lifespan of roughly four years, after which they are destroyed, Fisher says, usually by piling them up at a job site and setting fire to them. With more than 4 million mats in use in North America, that's an awful lot of waste. "Matting has the potential to eclipse the forestry industry for wood waste," he notes.
GEM is in talks with Decentralised Energy Canada (DEC), a national technology accelerator, about building a "waste-to-energy" plant capable of turning nearly any flammable object into electric power and/or heat. Waste-to-energy technology is gaining popularity in Europe. Although burning waste in such plants creates CO2 emissions, those emissions are less harmful to the environment than the methane gases that would be emitted if that waste were buried in landfills, according to the International Solid Waste Association. And, of course, turning waste into energy reduces the need to burn fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas to produce power. This is why the European Union has called for phasing out landfills in favor of waste-to-energy plants. But before building such a plant, DEC must know it would have a dependable and predictable source of burnable material for several years.
GEM can be a reliable source, but bringing mats to be burned at a plant only makes economic sense if they don't need to be transported any more than 100 miles, Fisher says. RFID makes this possible because it lets GEM track individual mats throughout their life cycle. "So part of our plan is brand-new mats go to more remote locations," he says. "In years two, three and four, we can start using them closer in and work them toward an area with a facility close by where they can be turned into power."
If all this sounds unusually forward thinking and ambitious, it is. It's also pure GEM, a small company that saw a problem and harnessed the power of RFID to solve it.