How to Address the Skills Shortage in the Moisture Measurement Industry

New hope found in advanced tech  

The Covid pandemic, conflict in Ukraine and resulting crisis in energy supplies these major world events created a siege mentality among many businesses, where the focus has been on either managing short-term disruption or fighting for survival. 

Although these crises are by no means over, companies are beginning to find ways of adapting to the new order of things and are returning their attention to longer-term goals of business remodelling, growth and profitability – objectives that now bring a fresh set of challenges. 

For many industrial businesses, a major threat is the loss of skills and experience as aging employees leave the workplace, together with the challenge of transferring retained systems and process knowledge to new recruits.

An aging industrial demographic 

This is not a new phenomenon. The average age of the industrial employee has been steadily rising for decades. In 2019, Smart Energy International magazine reported that around 50 % of energy utility workers in the US would retire within 10 years, highlighting ‘the lack of experience of new incumbents in the industry who need practical, hands-on ability, and increasingly, the guidance of those who have it. This makes recruiting the next generation of utility workers challenging at best.

Until recently, the rate at which skills were being lost was relatively slow. Covid-19, however, has caused an acceleration, with large numbers of employees reconsidering the nature of work. Many have opted for early retirement, while others are changing their work–life balance, moving to less stressful jobs to reduce their working hours or minimize travel to and from their workplace.

The recent Energy Outlook report, from oilandgasjobsearch.com and Brunel, found the biggest issues facing recruiters were an aging workforce, lack of skilled staff, and staff churn (high staff turnover), especially in areas such as operations and maintenance.

Skills, automation and intelligent technologies 

Stemming the rate of skills loss depends on capturing knowledge – much of which may be undocumented – and then developing effective training programs to upskill both existing and new recruits. The Energy Outlook report found, however, that 40 % of respondents believed that training programs, where they existed, were insufficient to address the problem. 

Of equal importance is the need to make greater use of automation systems and, where possible, to embed human knowledge into operating systems. This is already happening – for example, in the vital field of moisture and hydrocarbon dew-point measurement in natural gas, our Condumax II offers fully automatic online measurement with digital communications for integration into site SCADA or DCS – but it needs to be fast-tracked and more widespread.

In applications where remote control or high degrees of localized automation are impractical, the use of intelligent technologies can offer an effective solution, especially for on-site staff with limited experience. Our recently launched portable dew-point tester, the CDP301 uses the long-established first-principle cooled-mirror method. It is designed to be used by site staff who may lack experience of making such measurements, yet can gather precise readings from sampling points, with all mirror-image video and data automatically recorded for subsequent analysis by an off-site specialist.

The CDP301 features a high-resolution color LCD. This offers each operator a clear image of the mirror surface during measurement cooling cycles, while dedicated illumination techniques enable the unambiguous identification of water and hydrocarbon dew formations. Manual cooling increments enable swift measurementsin 5 to 10 minutes, and automatic cooling rate control, in combination with enhanced image analysis, enables the operator to achieve high precision within ±0.5 °C when applying ISO 6327 and ASTM D1142 test methods.

These advances in technology enable even novice staff who are unfamiliar with dew-point measurements to achieve objective and repeatable results. This self-contained rechargeable battery-powered instrument makes field deployment easy, while offering full Ex certification.

Although technology will never fully replace the human element, at least not for the foreseeable future, industry needs to take further steps to balance its use of advanced automation and intelligent systems against its dependence on an ever-decreasing pool of skilled and experienced employees. Unless urgent action is taken, we could find ourselves facing another crisis – this one being of our own making. 

Click here to browse our range of hydrocarbon dew-point products.

Sources:

Energy Outlook Report

Smart Energy Magazine