Sep 15, 2015 3 min read

It’s a 45-foot-long, 12-foot-high rolling museum of technology. And Tuesday at least, Chintan Patel was the curator.

“This trailer is always on the road,” he said from inside the Siemens Innovative Solutions Mobile Showcase – which, at the moment and for the better part of the day, was not on the road but parked in Southpointe.

“We pretty much touch all 48 continental states.”

The mobile exhibit touched a lot of minds during the morning and afternoon as the centerpiece of Siemens’ Oil & Gas Conference at the California University’s Innovation Center on Technology Drive. So did presentations and workshops for about two dozen people conducted in the campus classrooms nearby during an eight-hour program that focused on emerging trends in automation, instrumentation and controls being used in the oil and gas industry.

Siemens is certainly becoming a bigger energy player.

The Germany-based company is involved in seemingly everything, with a number of divisions and an estimated 343,000 employees in 200 countries. Siemens, the largest engineering firm in Europe, has 289 major production and manufacturing plants.

Two of Siemens’ major acquisitions over the past 16 months have been energy-related: Rolls-Royce Holdings’ energy assets, for $1.3 billion, and Dresser-Rand Group, an oil and gas equipment manufacturer, for $7.8 billion.

This emphasis is reflected in the mobile center.

Patel said the exhibits inside have been repurposed over the past year “to a mostly oil and gas focus. The company is very proactive in this field.”

Siemens employees led personalized and small-group tours of the mobile unit, explaining and answering questions. Eight of the dozen applications inside are oil- and gas-related: multiple pump skid; remote monitoring; tank farm; MCC retrofit; reliable pump control for the oil and gas industry; pipe wrangler; valve control and monitoring; and vapor recovery. Each is accompanied by an informational graphic on-screen, a detailed written explanation of the hardware used and actual working models of the products.

Patel is one curator who doesn’t mind if you touch the items on display. In fact, he encourages that.

“Our engineers have to see and touch everything that is on display. You can watch a detailed display online, but unless you see and touch, you can’t appreciate that these are real products,” said Patel, who is not really a curator, but an oil and gas development manager based in Houston.

The showcase was in the heart of Marcellus Shale on Tuesday, but will be headed east then south. It is in the midst of a 20-week, 80-city tour.

“The challenge for us is to find central locations,” Patel said. “We go to customers instead of them coming to us. We can take individual customers at lunchtime.”

The sessions inside included “Connecting the Digital Oil Field” and “Choosing the Right Instrumentation.” Joe Bodnar, an oil and gas business developer for Siemens in the Pittsburgh area, had an interesting presentation titled, “Automation in Oil & Gas.”

“We are offering a total automation portfolio for applications in oil and gas,” he said. “We have to be able to say we have all of the products that you need. And every product we have has built-in diagnostics.”