Outback innovation — LTE in energy

Australian oil and gas producer Beach Energy has rolled out a private LTE voice and data system at its remote South Australian site.

Beach Energy is the largest onshore oil producer in Australia. Based in Adelaide, the company’s core business and the majority of its operations are in the Cooper Basin in both South Australia and Queensland.

Beach Energy has been working in the Cooper Basin for about 13 years, and in terms of communications has been served by an analog UHF radio system with just a single channel.

“We were in the position where we had to upgrade our communications out there, and we looked at upgrading the radio network to either be VHF or UHF, but to go with digital,” said Simon McMahon, the company’s general manager IT. “And that certainly would have been an improvement on what we had out there, [but] we just thought that it really wasn’t giving us a lot extra. At the end of the day, data is king, and we wanted something that could use voice but also utilise the data… because we are really pushing data out to the guys out there a lot more, requiring them to be logging into systems a lot more than they used to.”

For this reason, the company has recently installed a private LTE voice and data network to cover the main areas of its Cooper Basin operation. Beach partnered with Nokia Networks, Cisco Systems and Melbourne-based telecommunications integrator Challenge Networks to build the system.

McMahon said that occupational health and safety is paramount for the company, and this includes reducing the dangers of driving on the company’s roads.

“Although our roads are good — we spend a lot of money on them — there is a reasonable amount of traffic on them, from moving rigs or other equipment around,” he said. “Just driving is one of the most dangerous parts of our job. So in enabling people to have access to [comms and IT] systems wherever they are, it means they don’t have to drive as much. If they don’t have to drive as much, they’re safer. Simple as that, really.”

Nokia supplied its high-capacity, scalable Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Stations plus its Flexi Zone Small Cells to provide capacity for the operation’s data and voice traffic. The core backbone is based on Cisco technology, and the vehicles are fitted with Intercel modems and ZCG Scalar antennas, both of the latter being from Australian firms.

“We’re really happy with the relationships we’re building up with [all of] those companies,” said McMahon. “We were really keen on using Australian suppliers when we could. Challenge Networks has been fantastic. But when we couldn’t [use local manufacturers], we were keen on using really good providers such as Nokia and Cisco.

“It’s important that the money we do spend, we spend well, because when you put this sort of infrastructure out there, it does become very important to your business and you want it to be good gear, work well and be reliable.”

Another safety aspect is the use of rugged and intrinsically safe phones. “A couple of the units we have out there are intrinsically safe now, [and] any new ones we’ll be sourcing will be intrinsically safe,” said McMahon. “We’re using Sonim equipment.”

The technology

McMahon said the LTE set-up comprises two towers at present, one of which is a COW (cell on wheels). Although the phones talk directly to the towers when they are in range, in practice staff are often a long way from a tower and this is when they communicate through the vehicles, which have been set up as hotspots.

“We’re using a VoIP system because we don’t want the phones to be having to necessarily see the towers themselves,” said McMahon. “The vehicles have high-gain antennas on the roof, with dual antennas feeding into a modem. The modem is then creating an internal Wi-Fi — it’s giving out a small signal within and outside the vehicle. So when the phone’s not connected directly to an LTE tower, it’s connected back into the VoIP system through the vehicle’s Wi-Fi.

And because the company operates its own phone system, if [a worker’s] desk phone is ringing, it will simultaneously ring their mobile. And if they are ringing from the mobile, it gives out the number of their desk phone. “And that seems to be working really well,” said McMahon.

“We don’t have coverage over the whole area, but the main thoroughfare where people are travelling, and our main infrastructure, is covered,” he said, adding that “the extra range we get with having the antennas on the vehicle is probably about eight or 10 kilometres.

“We’re just finding with the antennas in the vehicles, they’re just communicating so much better, because of the height,” he said. “We had some antennas specially made up by ZCG Scalar. We wanted the antennas to be the same height or just slightly less than the dune flags on the vehicles, so they made some antennas especially for us, which gives us greater range.

“We really want to use Australian companies as much as we can; we’ve got a good relationship with them now.”

In terms of the overall system, McMahon is a fan of sticking with standards-based equipment wherever possible.

“At the end of the day, although we’re the largest onshore oil producer in the country, we’re not looking at putting a thousand of these towers up. It’s still a relatively small install,” he said. “So we wanted to have stuff that was pretty standard; we didn’t want to have to reinvent the wheel because it wasn’t in anyone’s interest.

“And the beauty of it is, because it’s standard we can choose our user equipment at the end of the day. If we decide for one reason or another that we didn’t like a particular piece of equipment, we can change [supplier].”

One of the traditional drawbacks of cellular technology has been the inability to do one-too-many PTT calls. But that’s fast becoming a thing of the past. “We have the ability for PTT using Cisco Instant Connect software,” said McMahon. “We’re actually tying it up with our office environment here, so that we will have the ability for key personnel to be able to communicate — so I can be here in the office and communicate with the people out there through PTT groups.”

Simon Lardner, director at Challenge Networks, said that his company was proud to have partnered with Beach Energy to provide a turnkey rollout. “As an organisation which specialises in delivering LTE networks, this particular implementation assumes great significance owing to the speed of the deployment (less than eight weeks from order to launch) and it being one of the first private LTE network rollouts in the world,” he said.

Benefits aplenty

Summarising the benefits the LTE system has brought, McMahon reiterated that safety was always the most important consideration. “If we can make people potentially work more efficiently in the sense of not having to drive as much, the facts are that they’re going to be safer,” he said.

“I think one thing which is a real plus though, is that we don’t have to do a lot in the way of training, because people already know how to use a smartphone,” he said. “It’s not like you’re giving someone a piece of equipment that they’ve never used before. That is one thing we’re finding probably even more of a plus than we really gave it credit for.”

This familiarity with smartphone technology is also proving to be a confidence booster with personnel, who are now far more easily contactable — in the case of a family emergency, for instance.

“You know what it’s like with a mobile phone. If you take a mobile phone away from someone now, they’d feel like you’d cut one of their hands off. It’s even more the case out there [in the bush],” said McMahon.

Although Beach has not yet issued its field workers with tablet computers, McMahon said that it is coming, citing the expected benefit of all workers having access to the latest information. “If you’re giving people printouts… it’s very hard to know if they’ve been rolled out to everyone — someone might be reading off an old one,” he said. “Whereas if it’s all live, you know that if you make a change, it’s rolled out to everyone [immediately], which is a real benefit.”

There have been unexpected benefits too. “The individuals are seeing more potential benefits for how they may be able to use it in the future; they’re saying, ‘Oh wow, we can do this as well’,” said McMahon.

He cites the case of an issue they were having with an engine. Beach staff needed to liaise with the manufacturer of the engine in Adelaide. Ordinarily the staff member would have had to make a phone call, then go to the engine and have some work done on it, then go back to the phone and report on the results, and so on. But with the LTE smartphones, he could conduct the liaison directly from the site of the problem, including audio and video of the engine if needed.

“It turned a half-a-day job into just a couple of hours,” said McMahon. “It might sound a bit far-fetched, but it isn’t — a picture can tell a thousand words, and if you can do that, it can make [the worker’s] lives a lot easier.”