Here’s how HiberHilo keeps your wells online, even when the weather has other plans.

Oil wells are in some of the harshest environments on the planet. And they have to work.

Article · 2 min read

Oil wells are tough. Because they have to be. They’re in some of the harshest environments on the planet. And they have to work. No matter what.

 

And the people who monitor these wells are tough, too. Because visiting wells isn’t an easy task, even when the weather is favourable. But there are some cases where being tough simply isn’t enough. Sometimes the weather makes visiting a well prohibitively dangerous.

 

Take the monsoon season, for example. From October to March, wet, violent rainstorms batter much of Southeast Asia. These rains can keep boats moored. Cars off roads. And helicopters on land. And these storms are deadly. Al Jazeera claims that monsoons took the lives of over 1600 people in India alone in 2019.

 

Another example? Hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. When a hurricane is on its way, oil companies have to evacuate platforms to make sure crews stay safe. The only people left behind are skeleton crews that are essential to production. And if the hurricane becomes more dangerous, those crews have to leave too.


These weather events mean that pressure monitoring becomes virtually impossible at some points during the year. And even though most wells are built to handle pressure build up, it’s nerve-wracking for engineers, who don’t know what’s happening at the wellhead. If the pressure buildup becomes too much, there are risks for leaks. And the risk grows every day that there isn’t a pressure measurement.

 

HiberHilo can’t change the weather. But it can give your team some peace of mind when storms keep your engineers away from the well.

 

Like your wells, HiberHilo is built to last. The gateway itself is made of diecast aluminum to prevent rusting, and it’s IP67 rated to keep water, sand, and other irritants away from the internal electronics.

 

The sensors are also sturdy enough to withstand salty marine environments, battering sand and dust storms, swampy jungle air, and cold tundra winds. Our engineers thought a lot about how to make HiberHilo survive the harshest conditions on the planet, and the resulting hardware is tough enough for almost any environment.

 

As for data transmission during storms, HiberHilo’s engineered to cut through any noise. The gateway uses low frequency radio waves to send and receive data.

 

The low frequency means we can cover a wider physical area, which means you can connect oil wells within a ten kilometre radius. But it also means that your data is less likely to get lost in any radio disruption caused by the weather. So you’ll always know what’s happening at the well. Even if the weather gets severe.