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OG Clean Fuels (previously Orange Gas) is legally obliged in Germany to be able to remotely access its gas tank installations and has to be able to prove that they can switch the installation off in case of emergency. This means they need a secure remote connection to all their installations in the Netherlands and Germany. The project was to cover the over 250 locations in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, and was particularly challenging as the hardware and software environments often differed greatly per filling station.
We installed ServiceGates at OG Clean Fuels’ installations. These were coupled to, mainly outdated, PLCs as OG Clean Fuels usually takes over existing filling stations where the equipment was installed by local installation engineers using all kinds of different programmes and installations. Because of this proliferation of hardware and software, the biggest challenge for us was creating a uniform solution. We even had to add and connect up so-called MPI ethernet convertors at a number of stations so as to be able to communicate with the supporting devices. In other words, each location had to have its own approach.
We realised the roll out with our partner Remondis. We also gave advice on, for instance, the choice of sim card for all 4G routers and coordinated the installation. That the ServiceGates were provided with sim cards was an additional customised service.
The most important element was the realisation process and first listening to what OG Clean Fuels needed. We then basically took on the whole project management. This was especially relevant when OG Clean Fuels decided to expand our solution by getting us to develop a single dashboard for all locations in the Netherlands and Germany. OG Clean Fuels now uses the dashboard we developed to monitor malfunctions and we have, as such, therefore developed an extremely reliable fault management platform within our own IOT environment and at minimal cost.
Erik van der Meijde | realisation engineer
