The nondescript gizmo sits on a conference room table, looking safe as milk, and almost as dull.
Nothing futuristic or fancy. No buzz, bells, whistles, robotics, or dazzling graphics — just a can, resembling a miniature castle turret, housed in a heavy casing, with connectors all around.
Clearly, a guy wouldn’t have to be a rocket scientist to dream up the Smart-Alek.
Well, yes . . . actually, he would.
The brass at zed.i solutions — one of those up-to-the-minute outfits which eschew capital letters — are touting their new instrument as a truly significant oilpatch breakthrough.
They say Smart-Alek drags the critically important science of pressure, temperature and well-flow monitoring into the 21st century.
And they speak about the Large Brain that birthed this baby the way the Beatles once spoke of the Maharishi.
To them, chief technology officer Tokunosuke Ito, 42, is a seer, a prophet, and one heck of an all-purpose engineer, as well as a rocket scientist — which he most certainly is.
Ito was credited with a 1985 fix of the Space Shuttle’s hydraulic servo valves, a problem stubborn enough to delay several launches.
A Japan-born PhD who aced mechanical and aerospace engineering at Oklahoma State University, the gentle man his friends call Toku also came up with a control design for a hydraulic suspension system, later incorporated by Volvo.
Pretty hot tickets. And zed.i’s got him.
Ito originally moved to Alberta to join his brother-in-law in the development of pressure gauges for well-testing purposes. He came over to zed.i solutions during the late 1980s.
“He sees technology three years before everybody else,” said product manager Jeff Edwards, who added that he was “bowled over” when he first met Ito in Edmonton.
Another Edwards, Murray by name (he’s everywhere), is similarly smitten with Smart-Alek.
As a zed.i release puts it, the ubiquitous Mr. Edwards has “taken a leading position in the company’s recent financing.”
That would refer to the $8.85 million which zed.i solutions raised when it went public (ZED on the CDNX) this spring, after several years of operating privately.
The way Jeff Edwards tells it, zed.i’s corporate direction turned an abrupt about-face three years ago, after its resident rocket scientist called a meeting, based on his own exciting research in the company’s Edmonton lab.
“Up to that point, all our products had been well-test products,” Jeff explained.
“Then Toku sat us down, and told us: ‘This (i.e. the Smart-Alek) is what’s coming.’ He proposed that we needed to get into production monitoring.”
And at zed.i solutions, when Toku speaks, even the biggest bosses listen.
“The potential for this technology is dramatic and large,” nodded Keith Smith, the president and CEO.
Smart-Alek is being energetically marketed as a fail-safe, explosion-proof, wireless pipeline and petroleum-well monitor which can save energy companies serious money. It records pressure drops and well flow, while instantly alerting field engineers as well as the home office, whether it’s in Hobbema or Hoboken.
But EPCOR Utilities Corp. of Edmonton is also checking out its potential for monitoring water pressure.
Smith pointed out that the technology can be adapted to detect “pinhole leaks anywhere” in city waterworks systems, and will readily adapt to electrical, sewer, or waste-water management systems as well.
So what the hell is it?
In layman’s terms, Smart-Alek is a remote access early-warning device, poised to replace outmoded paper monitoring charts which wouldn’t have been out of place in Turner Valley, circa 1914.
CEO Smith explained it thus: “An engineer wants to know whether a well is producing within pre-established parameters. The Smart-Alek gives you the confidence to know your well is operating properly.”
“If it goes above or below pre-set limits, it sends an instant alarm on the Internet, or pages you, or your field guy.”
Smith’s customers tell him they lose five to 10 per cent of production because of freeze-up, or mechanical problems. So, he concludes, by alerting producers quickly and efficiently, the Smart-Alek becomes an intelligent tool for increasing production on a sustained basis.
“Companies spend billions a year to find the gas, then they use 30 or 40-year-old technology to monitor it,” Smith shook his head.
Among the sins of the old gear, says the zed.i team, are its inaccuracy, its failure to calculate flow rate, and its inability to tell an operator when wells are shutting down — instead, they must be checked in person.
But Smart-Alek’s cell and satellite capability means its miniaturized communications network can be adapted to virtually any well on the planet. It retails for $8,500, installed.
Besides, a rocket scientist developed it, and Murray Edwards likes it.
How much more does anyone need to know?
Web Watch:
www.smart-alek.com
