Steve Lohr reports on tne Times’ Bits Blog that Royal Dutch Shell is using high-tech sensor arrays in searchinh got oil. It’s certainly a good thing if risks associated with oil exploration and and acquisition are lowered. But it’s hard not to be cynical about the face oil companies present to the public.
In the last couple of years, the research laboratories at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been working on the next generation of digital sensors. They are smarter, smaller, consume less energy, and they can communicate wirelessly.
Their promise, writ large, is to help link the digital world of computing to the physical world as never before. The payoff would be to bring data-rich measurement, more intelligence and higher levels of optimization to all sorts of fields – including energy, traffic management, food distribution and health care. Lots of companies are working on parts of the broad vision, and I. that oB.M.’s “Smarter Planet” advertising campaign is the probably clearest articulation of the vision.
Royal Dutch Shell and Hewlett-Packard are announcing on Monday a step toward the mainstream use of next-generation sensor technology. The application – on-land oil and gas exploration – points toward the potential gains from advanced sensing systems.
No dollar figure is attached to the multiyear agreement, and Shell isn’t saying where it plans to first try this high-tech prospecting. But the oil company says the vastly more detailed seismic data collection and analysis should help it pinpoint new oil and gas reserves in difficult areas like under salt formations in the Middle East and deep pockets of natural gas in the North America.
Sensors are only one tool among the set of technologies needed in any number of industries. To make complex physical systems smarter also requires advances in storage, networking, data mining and analytics software. Still, the sensors are the vital measurement, data-harvesting and communications technology in the physical world – the digital eyes, ears and nose out there. The sensors may be an ingredient, but an essential one – just as the microprocessor may not be everything in computing, but it is the gateway technology that makes everything else possible.
In seismic prospecting for oil, big “thumper trucks” pound the ground to make sound waves that above-ground sensors then monitor. Today, 10,000 or 20,000 sensors, connected by wires, might be spread over an area 25 miles by 25 miles. With the Shell-H.P. sensing system, hundreds of thousands, up to a million, wireless sensors – about 3 inches by 4 inches – can be spread across a similar area. Each sensor, listening to the underground seismic echoes, is a data channel.
“If you can increase the number of data channels, the better you are able to listen,” explained Wim Walk, a geophysical scientist for Shell.
Hundreds of times more data will be generated with the new system. The raw data will be collected, mined and analyzed to create pictures of the geological formations and petroleum finds deep in the Earth.
Using the new technology, scientists say, opens the door to new levels of clarity – as in the difference between watching “Avatar” in 3-D or a regular theater screen.
via Smarter Sensors Start Going to Work – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.