In the Eagle Ford plays of deep south Texas, we have plenty to worry about: heat, dust, the occasional rattlesnake, and H2S for starters. Life certainly keeps us on our toes!

What our customers like about having their remote monitoring data readily available through Zedi Access™ is that it shortens their list of things to worry about. Considerably.

What if your pipelines or wells could call you up and tell you they were sick before they went down?

If you’ve ever gone to the doctor to get some medicine at the first sign of a fever—to try to shorten the illness—you understand what I mean.

I love a good conference; one where the speakers not only have good information, but where they also dream a little bit about how the new information will improve the future. It always energizes my imagination about how we can better use technology to partner with our customers and help them achieve their goals.

It’s pretty amazing to watch the pace of mergers and acquisitions these days. Oil and gas producers are working hard to maximize investments in an economy that’s better than it was, but still not where everyone would like it to be.

Even so, it’s one thing to sign a contract to acquire a new field, and it’s another thing to handle the new field’s SCADA systems, data and controls. The question is, do you accept the system that’s there and train your people on yet another software package? Or do you spend possibly tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of time replacing their system with your own—and if you do that, what happens to the legacy data they’d already collected?

SCADA and other remote monitoring systems introduced a step change to the industry in the area of operational efficiency by providing a positive impact on run-time, production and reduced operating costs. However, with low commodity prices and lower producing wells, there is still a challenge for business cases to justify putting monitoring on all assets.