You are here: Home » Green ICT » Applications » Carbon economy to spur bandwidth demand surge

Carbon economy to spur bandwidth demand surge

Tony Chan | August 26, 2008 | 0 Comments

The Australian government’s proposed carbon ‘cap and trade’ system has the potential to radically change the telecoms industry by driving up demand, according to Brett O’Riley, CEO of Perth-based Ochre Services.

As a company that operates in a region where the dominant economic drivers are carbon-intensive heavy industries such as oil and gas and natural resources, Ochre is very close to the situation. With operations in remote and hard to reach and often, inhospitable, areas, these industries are faced with the challenge of getting still labour to where they are needed.

“The impact of carbon credits will be what I think a much higher cost of travel for industries. That will be quite a significant impact on the telecoms business,” O’Riley said. “For example, in Western Australia today, there’s a thing called FIFO, which is fly in fly out, so every day, there are between 2,000 and 5,000 workers flying in and out of northern part of Western Australia, which is a pretty unfriendly environment because there’s no particular good infrastructure out there.”

With the pending implementation of carbon cap and trade in the country, the ability to manage their carbon emissions is now one of the biggest challenges for the resource companies that employed these workers, as well as for the region’s government, which depend on those industries for its economy.

“With the pressure from carbon credits, all the resource companies are looking at ways to help reduce their carbon footprint, and technology is about the only way,” O’Riley said.
The situation is so serious that the region’s government is now exploring the possibility of actually building out a whole city out near where those workers need to be, and investing in infrastructure that offers a good quality of life.

“There’s concern by the Western Australian government that when the carbon credits system is adopted, it might even make these industries uneconomical with their current operational model,” O’Riley said. To provide a solution to sustain those industries, the WA government is even considering the construction of an actual city, instead of the small outback towns currently there today.

“It’s not that bad out there now, and it’s ok if you are single and the money is good,” O’Riley said. “But it’s not a place where you settle down and raise a family at this point.”

BANDWIDTH HUNGRY
In the interim, the most effective solutions are based on communications technologies that can reduce the labour requirements of remote areas and automatic systems and processes previously carried out by human staff.

According to O’Riley, one such application is a driverless train project being implemented by Rio Tinto, one of the country’s largest energy and resources companies, which would allow the company to run its fleet of iron ore trains along a 1,000 kilometre route. Other applications are being developed by the oil and gas industry to transmit data from applications, such as 4D sesmic – which monitors the oil flow inside an oil field for extraction, back to centralised management centres in larger cities such as Perth, and even as far as Houston, Texas for data processing and analysis.

One characteristics of this type of applications is that they are bandwidth intensive since they are replacing human eyes and ears in many cases.

Another effect of this trend is that demand for bandwidth is emerging in new and previously underserved regions, O’Riley said, adding that remote oil and gas fields, when automated with the applications, could generate more bandwidth demand than some cities.