The oil and gas sector is one of the largest in the world in terms of dollar value and comes with various safety risks, regulations, physically challenging environments, fluctuating markets, and more. With rising global demand, economical issues, and calls for more efficient operations, the oil and gas sector has now started to adopt augmented reality (AR) to leverage its benefits to enhance business operations.

The oil and gas industry requires highly skilled and experienced people but with the economic crisis and the pandemic, the industry is leaving many of its older employees. As a result, the companies are now struggling to leverage the expertise. At the same time, the operational pace is drastically accelerating in the oil and gas sector urging companies to switch to augmented reality technology to work with fewer people and tight budgets to improve efficiency.

Many companies in the oil and gas sector are undergoing digital transformation to reduce operational costs, provide more safety to their employees, and increase efficiency. Here is how augmented reality finds its application in the oil and gas industry.

Application of augmented reality in the oil and gas sector

Augmented reality is now used in the oil and gas sector for training, maintenance, self-service and to improve the safety of the employees. In a short span of time it has proven to be a smart asset to invest in. Let’s look into the application of augmented reality in the oil and gas sector in detail.

Training employees in the oil and gas sector with augmented reality

To work in an oil and gas sector is a very demanding job and to train the newly joined employees can be a critical task as it may require the trainees to be sent to remote places. Just theoretical knowledge can be insignificant to work in such a challenging environment. With augmented reality, you can provide real life like training to them and it also serves as an upgrade to field handbooks and other training materials. This also helps companies save money spent on travel expenses.

Easy maintenance and provision for self-service with augmented reality

In the oil and gas sector when some machines require repairing it has to be done at an urgent pace. Any delay in this can cause many processes to be interrupted which leaves the workers under tremendous pressure to resolve the issue at the earliest. One of the biggest problems the oil and gas manufacturers and distributors in India face is to have their OEM’s or licensors to fly from different geographies to assist and address their field technicians. To fix this problem, after testing multiple solutions, many of them decided to sign up with CoTech.ai. Using CoTech.ai, you can easily connect with licensors remotely with one click of a button and interact with them better, creating a multiplex of savings in the OPEX budget. Therefore with AR remote support provided by CoTech.ai, you can connect with an expert technician in real-time without getting them there in flesh who will then provide you with AR instructions along with AR annotations to avoid unnecessary errors and misinterpretations.

The AR-powered wearables can project hands-free detailed instructions a technician needs to inspect, fix or maintain a complex machinery or equipment. It gives even minor details such as where a cable must go and which parts to be adjusted or removed. In short, it gives all necessary steps which reduce the chance of error occurrence. Therefore instead of depending on manuals, with AR, you can get real-time smart instructions right in front of you.

Improved safety with augmented reality

The workers in the oil and gas sector are always exposed to harmful environments. This indeed makes them prone to various injuries and other health issues. Also, at many times the companies will have to send multiple employees to the field just to make routine checks on their electric lines. Since this involves 11KV lines which is dangerous, most companies want to keep the number of people there to the minimum. By using CoTech.ai, you can bring down these risks. Work instructions for self-service are added to the custom CoTech.ai. If the self-help fails to address the issue that the field engineer is trying to solve, he/she can remotely connect with the expert (relay engineer) sitting at the command center. Therefore in cases of risk, the employees can remain calm and work to make it right with the instructions provided to them using remote support and collaboration with augmented reality.

Therefore the bottom line is that there are a lot of benefits implementing augmented reality in the O&G sector. In case you need a professional consultation on AR, feel free to contact us at info@iboson.io. We have innovative AR solutions for the oil and gas sector and are happy to help anytime!