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Marine transportation and logistics company Edison Chouest Offshore (ECO) uses Mojix’s RFID technology to track tools, equipment, food and other consumables traveling to and from offshore oil rigs.
The Mojix system provides a more effective and stable way to transport cargo to the oil exploration team in the Gulf of Mexico, reducing costs by real-time understanding of the status and location of leased equipment (such as pipes, valves or generators). For example, Edison Chouest Offshore can learn about the equipment returned by the offshore rig in real time, and immediately return the leased equipment to avoid unnecessary unnecessary costs. Said Dane Vizier, general manager of the company’s C-Logistics department.
The ECO C-Logistics department purchases, sells or leases equipment or materials for its oil exploration customers, including consumables, tools and heavy equipment. The company then transports these items from its Port Fourchon plant to the required oil extraction platform.
C-Logistics yard includes 9 slipways-truck unloading and vessel loading area
In order to track the location and movement of supplies (which can be anything, from soap boxes to anchors, or thousands of feet of pipes), ECO’s C-Logistics department used notes to manually record information and scan barcodes; when supplies and equipment It is delivered by truck, stacked on the loading platform, and then photographed when it is loaded onto the ship. The same process is also applied to customer device return records. Before the RFID system was installed, the data related to the process-most of which was done manually-was stored in the company’s proprietary software system Triton.
In Port Fourchon, ECO operates a 24-acre storage yard to receive and store materials and equipment for offshore oil exploration platforms. The company uses a 500-ton aerial tower crane to load cargo onto the ship. The yard includes 9 berths for unloading goods by trucks and loading goods on ships. Approximately 130 trucks transport equipment and supplies every day, which are sent by barges. When the barges enter the company slipway, they load water, fuel, sludge (consisting of water, clay, and chemical mixtures, used to lubricate and cool the drilling and wash away rocks), and various materials and equipment.
Edison Chouest hopes to adopt a plan to make this process more visible, require less labor, and ensure faster and more accurate delivery of goods. Vizier said: “We want to gain greater visibility of loading docks and trucks loading and unloading goods, and to understand the location of each piece of equipment.”
In 2008, ECO invited Mojix and four other RFID companies to demonstrate their technology. ECO then held a test project on the berth, pasting metal special passive tags on the equipment or material containers. It is a challenge to locate a passive tag (normal work) in a high metal, large area environment. Each berth is 135 feet wide and 30 feet high-the tag must be readable from a long distance. In the first quarter of 2010, Edison Chouest selected the Omni-ID EPC Gen 2 RFID tag-the best reading distance in the test, Vizier said. The company installed Mojix nodes and antennas on both sides of each berth, and installed a central STAR reader on each berth.
eNodes can act as activators, sending UHF RF signals to the Omni-ID tag, which sends its unique ID code to the STAR reader. The reader then forwards the data to the ECO back-end system, explained Robert Kowalik, Mojix sales director. When materials are loaded or unloaded from the ship, he said, Mojix software uses algorithms to determine the location of the tag and its moving direction.The system then sends the information to the Triton software
If the cargo sent by a truck has only one oil drilling customer, the vehicle will go directly to the berth loading area assigned to that customer. If the truck has more than one customer, then it unloads the cargo at the yard.
In both cases, when the goods are unloaded from the truck, C-Logistics workers stick the RFID tag on the equipment or the material container. By scanning or visually reading the barcode or the alphanumeric code provided by the product supplier, the ID code of each label then corresponds to the data of the attached item. The goods are then taken from the berth unloading area or yard, put into the warehouse, the RFID reader at the warehouse gate reads the tags, and the position and status of the tags are updated in the back-end system. However, some large cargoes are still stored on the yard.
Before the goods are loaded on the ship, workers remove materials and equipment from the warehouse or yard and transport them to the loading area near the berth. Warehouse employees use a handheld computer equipped with a PCMCIA card RFID reader to read tags within 20 feet of the distance to confirm the loaded materials.
When the item is loaded on the ship, the Mojix system reads the tag again, confirms that the item is loaded on the correct ship, and sends a message to the Triton software to upgrade the order status. The software then corresponds each ID code to the loading list. If the items loaded on the ship are incorrect, the system sends an alarm.
“This helps oil companies save time and money,” Vizier said. Moreover, the system also reduces the risk of errors, such as a required item is not loaded on the ship, delaying offshore oil extraction. This system also helps C-Logistics manage the delivery and return of leased equipment-the daily rental fee is approximately $25,000-$125,000.
In the next phase, Kowalik stated that the company will install eNodes in the yard (large equipment is still placed in the storage area of the yard), which is expected to be completed in the second quarter of this year.
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