Local start-up developing technology for energy sector

Re­duc­ing hu­man er­ror and in­creas­ing op­er­a­tional as­sur­ance are crit­i­cal fac­tors for the sur­vival of any busi­ness and this is the mis­sion of for­mer bpTT process plant op­er­a­tor who us­es soft­ware to em­pow­er peo­ple in high-risk in­dus­tri­al fa­cil­i­ties, to op­er­ate sig­nif­i­cant­ly safer and more ef­fec­tive.

Beekie, the CEO/founder of Op­erAID told the Busi­ness Guardian that af­ter a near-miss in­ci­dent, he recog­nised how eas­i­ly un­in­ten­tion­al hu­man er­rors oc­cur.

“I made an op­er­a­tional mis­take. If left unchecked it could have been sig­nif­i­cant. That was in 2008 and while I was there I al­ways thought this should not have hap­pened and es­pe­cial­ly as a se­nior op­er­a­tor I should have known bet­ter.But hu­man er­ror is some­thing we al­ways have to fight with­in the in­dus­try,” Beekie ex­plained.

It was the de­sire to elim­i­nate such er­rors, not on­ly in T&T, but in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, which gave Beekie the im­pe­tus to cre­ate Op­erAID; an op­er­a­tors aid so­lu­tion.

So what makes this sys­tem so unique?

The tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides an au­to­mat­ed au­dit trail of work as pre­scribed in stan­dard op­er­at­ing pro­ce­dures (SOP), check­lists, iso­la­tion (lock­out/tagout) pro­ce­dures, pre-start-up safe­ty re­views (PSSR) among oth­er mea­sures.

Ac­cord­ing to Beekie by re­duc­ing the po­ten­tial for hu­man er­ror in com­plex oil, gas and petro­chem­i­cal op­er­a­tional process­es it could help im­prove process safe­ty, re­duce po­ten­tial en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pacts and more im­por­tant­ly, loss of life.

It wasn’t so long ago the coun­try mourned the trag­ic deaths of divers, Fyzal Kur­ban, Kaz­im Ali Jr, Rishi Na­gas­sar and Yusuf Hen­ry em­ployed by Paria Fu­el Trad­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd.

In Feb­ru­ary they dis­ap­peared in­to a pipeline dur­ing an un­der­wa­ter main­te­nance ex­er­cise.

Their man­gled bod­ies were lat­er found. A com­mis­sion of en­quiry in­to the mat­ter is on­go­ing.

In giv­ing his own take on what pos­si­bly oc­curred on that fate­ful day Beekie said, “I could tell you that was an iso­la­tion is­sue. It was a fail­ure of lock­out/tagout; it’s to pre­vent some­body else from ac­ti­vat­ing an en­er­gy source; valve, pump, elec­tric­i­ty and that was a pure fail­ure of lock­out/tagout.

“And this is with­out hav­ing any in­side in­for­ma­tion,” Beekie said.

It’s in­ci­dents like these that Beekie em­pha­sised, can be avoid­ed if the prop­er sys­tems are em­ployed.

Op­erAID is al­so co-found­ed by Beekie’s busi­ness part­ner, Cel­win Tirath.

Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny’s web­site, Tirath is a US mil­i­tary vet­er­an “ex­pe­ri­enced in build­ing and lead­ing high per­form­ing glob­al teams de­liv­er­ing en­ter­prise soft­ware so­lu­tions.”

In de­tail­ing the jour­ney in bring­ing the busi­ness to fruition, Beekie said a cou­ple years ago he en­rolled in a Sil­i­con Val­ley in­cu­ba­tor as T&T is not known for soft­ware cre­ation.

Grad­u­at­ing at the top of the class, Beekie then re­turned home and start­ed build­ing ver­sion one of Op­erAID.

The com­pa­ny was in the mak­ing since 2019 and was al­so en­gaged with At­lantic LNG dur­ing that time. How­ev­er, it was forced to face the on­slaught of COVID-19.

“It was a strug­gle fi­nan­cial­ly, for my­self. In the mid­dle of deal­ing with all the chal­lenges of the pan­dem­ic and then my sis­ter died in the mid­dle of all that with COVID, it was dif­fi­cult fi­nan­cial­ly and emo­tion­al­ly,” Beekie ex­plained.

But every cloud has a sliv­er lin­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to Beekie dur­ing the pan­dem­ic At­lantic was hav­ing a dif­fi­cult time in ver­i­fy­ing work.

“Be­cause the op­er­a­tions peo­ple had to be sep­a­rate and iso­lat­ed from man­age­ment, they re-en­gaged us. It (Op­erAID) was de­signed so you can sit any where in the world and know that things are hap­pen­ing the way they should and that’s how they en­gaged us. So, it took a while for At­lantic to ‘move over the hill’ as they say,” Beekie added.

The com­pa­ny al­so had its first tri­al in May this year at state-owned Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um, Point Fortin.

“We did a base­line as­sess­ment of Her­itage at the site in terms of how they op­er­ate and we com­pared the Op­erAID process and we are able to re­duce the time it takes to do the work. So it’s faster and more ac­cu­rate. Not on­ly re­duce the time but in­crease the as­sur­ance.

“We cre­at­ed a new cat­e­go­ry of soft­ware and we call it ‘op­er­a­tional as­sur­ance.’ We pro­vide the as­sur­ance re­mote­ly that work is be­ing done,” Beekie ex­plained.

He said post-trail, Her­itage re­quest­ed an im­ple­men­ta­tion pro­pos­al which was al­ready sub­mit­ted by Op­erAID.

This pro­pos­al is cur­rent­ly be­ing re­viewed by Her­itage’s IT and le­gal teams.

Work­ing with Her­itage, he added was ‘pret­ty easy’ as it has a com­plete­ly man­u­al sys­tem which it wants to im­prove.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Op­erAID was first lo­cal start-up com­pa­ny to test at a bp live gas fa­cil­i­ty.

“When we test­ed at bp we used a pro­to­type. bp has a com­mon op­er­at­ing en­vi­ron­ment and so the lo­cal man­age­ment of bp can­not im­ple­ment tech­nol­o­gy from a lo­cal per­spec­tive. They have to get ap­proval from the head of­fices. It takes a while for that to hap­pen,” Beekie said, adding he re­mains pos­i­tive of more dis­cus­sions.

Re­lat­ing gen­er­al chal­lenges Beekie said be­ing lo­cal it does nec­es­sar­i­ly mean there’s an em­brac­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

Beekie told the BG he ini­tial­ly thought it may have been eas­i­er for lo­cal en­ter­pris­es to buy in­to Op­erAID.

How­ev­er, this wasn’t al­ways the case.

“The ac­cep­tance of new tech­nol­o­gy in the US, they are much more will­ing to test it and we were sur­prise by that,” Beekie who is cur­rent­ly meet­ing with US com­pa­nies said.

On why the slow­er in­ter­est in Trinidad Beekie said lo­cal com­pa­nies tend to be “lag­gards.”

“There is an adop­tion curve. Trinida­di­an com­pa­nies tend to be on the lag­gards so they are not in­no­va­tors. If you could think of a bell curve they are on the oth­er side of it. They want it to be proven else where.And we feel some­times, and we could be wrong, that if it’s not a ‘Mi­crosoft’ do­ing it there’s a scep­ti­cism. We tend to have a dif­fi­cult time con­sid­er­ing in­no­va­tion might come from Trinidad,” Beekie ex­plained.

Even though the com­pa­ny was award­ed the ex­porTT’s re­search and de­vel­op­ment grant, there re­mains “some ap­pre­hen­sion at a State lev­el,” he added.

While this can be chal­leng­ing, Beekie said he has made it “his per­son­al agen­da” to prove that lo­cal en­ti­ties can do it too.

“With over 100 years of ex­pe­ri­ence in oil and gas we have nev­er in­vent­ed any thing for the in­dus­try we have pi­o­neered,” Beekie added.

But Op­erAID con­tin­ues to gain mo­men­tum. The com­pa­ny has al­ready ‘linked’with a cou­ple com­pa­nies in Texas to do tri­als.