Putting produced water or oil on the ground is always a bad thing. Given recent events in the Gulf of Mexico operators are under even more scrutiny to prevent environmental problems. Remote monitoring makes an oilfield operation more efficient in many ways but one of the easiest to calculate is in preventing spills. A system such as Wellkeeper’s permits any measured parameter to generate an alarm whenever it falls outside of a customer determined limit. In addition to alerting to a high tank level even more sophisticated determinations are now supported. For example an operator may want an alarm whenever a water tank is above 13 feet. To verify the head switch is operating properly they might also want an alarm any time the tank is above six feet and the water pump is not running. This alarm would give an advance notice of the former 13 foot alarm and allow even more time for response and potential prevention of an accidental overflow. This and many more conditions can be set up, detected notified, logged, and managed via a simple web based interface.
