Sabeus Deploys Fiber Optical Sensors in Brunei for Shell Oil
While the telecom industry literally moves at the speed of light, Big Oil continues to trudge along. But as petroleum reserves face increasing worldwide demand, and prices continue to rise, innovative use of fiber optic technology is catching on in an industry that is slow to change-and that’s great news for Sabeus Sensor Systems.
Sabeus’ Freeport facility produces high-precision telecommunications components and sensors for optical equipment. Their technology reduces the cost of manufacturing certain components in the optical communications network by 50 percent. This is done through a connectionless interface between an optical fiber and a chip or other non-fiber optical device. The novel interface reduces the need for expensive physical alignment during manufacturing.
The result? Sabeus has provided leading-edge components to more than 30 major telecom companies around the world, including Tyco and Marconi. Having survived the telecom bust of 2001, which many of its competitors didn’t survive, Sabeus fully understands the value of diversification-and it has found a ready market in the oil industry.
Improving Yields from Oil Fields
Sabeus’ technology improves oil recovery from existing fields by 10 to 20 percent, which translates to huge profits for oil companies. “Exploration for new wells is an extremely expensive proposition,” says Michael Hochmeister, vice president of operations. “These companies need to capture as much oil and gas as possible from existing wells.”
The electronic sensors that the industry has been using for years “don’t function properly or, in some cases, simply don’t survive when temperatures hit 250 degrees Celsius like they can deep inside an oil well,” Hochmeister says. “We’ve been working with smaller oil companies to prove that our sensors survive much longer and function better than the competition’s.”
Today the big oil companies are seeing green in Sabeus’s technology and are starting to buy large numbers of temperature and pressure sensor arrays-some of which are two kilometers long with several hundred sensors. The company recently deployed a fiber optical sensor a mile deep in Brunei for Shell Oil and is currently working with industry giants BP, Exxon and Conoco.
Oil and gas represents about a $2 billion market potential for the company. “There is a lot of competition in this sector, no doubt, but we are the only company with a vertically integrated fiber optics center. We manufacture the specialty fiber, produce the sensor arrays and calibrate the arrays all right here, in Pennsylvania.”
Moving Corporate Offices from California to Pennsylvania
In fact, Sabeus, which employs 55 people, has its corporate offices in Calabasas, CA. But Hochmeister says they’re moving all manufacturing to Freeport, thanks in part to a strong pool of skilled workers coming out of the area colleges, a technical expertise in the region and a public sector that he describes as “extremely helpful.”
Some of that public sector help is coming in the form of BFTP assistance-a $46,500 Innovation Adoption Grant to assist in a process improvement effort in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh. The process improvements will help further automate manufacturing operations, producing a greater yield and increasing capacity.
“Universities expand our talents and provide cost savings,” Hochmeister says. “It’s also extremely beneficial for us to get to know the grad students who may be future Sabeus employees.”
In addition to oil fields, Sabeus is looking under the water for applications of its sensor technology and recently received an order from the U.S. Navy. “Our sensor array, which can be “towed” behind a submarine, is a huge technological advance over the current standard for underwater sensing,” Hochmeister notes. “EMI (electromagnetic interference) can leave a submarine completely blind, but our technology doesn’t. It acts as a hydrophone, which listens for foreign bodies around the fleet, providing greater security and assurance.”
Hochmeister says the technology can also be used to sense objects under water in our harbors. “Harbor security is a growing concern, and we are working on several projects right now that could address that issue in the near future.”
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