Largest Refinery in Canada
The Irving Oil Refinery in Saint John is Canada’s largest refinery, producing finished energy products for wholesale and retail markets, including gasoline, diesel, heating oil, jet fuel and asphalt. More than 1,600 of its employees help to produce over 320,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

Improving Employee Safety Using Digitization
The Saint John refinery suffered a large industrial accident in 2018, causing extensive equipment damage as well as injuries to workers. Regulatory requirements were put in place to improve the handling of emergency situations and increase the efficiency of mustering.

To achieve this goal, Irving Oil decided to use RTLS hardware as a full access control system, to confirm operator rounds during routine maintenance, utilize the man down functions as well as any emergency being guided by handheld tablets. This would ensure faster rescue operations by immediately being aware of any injuries and preventing further ones by limiting unauthorized access.

This is even more important in the times when the facility coordinates regular planned maintenance in the form of shutdowns and turnarounds. As the facility is new to some of the incoming maintenance contractors, this is a matter of bringing safety to the employee / contractor through utilizing this new worker initiative and bring familiarity and competence to all end users. This requires increased safety and preventative measures.

100% Reliability Required in a Crowded High-Risk Environment
Sections of the facility are full of metallic objects, causing tracking technologies such as RFID to lose their signals, resulting into low reliability. As well, during events such as mustering, there is an increased possibility that all the employees can be at the same location, making it impossible to track them using narrowband RF tracking technologies.