Research Insights

In most equipment markets a supplier responds to an opportunity by offering a product, and qualification follows if the offer is accepted. Oil and gas works the other way round, and understanding that inversion is the practical key to this market. A supplier that has not been qualified by an operator cannot bid at all, whatever the merits of what it makes. Qualification therefore precedes

Seven water streams appear in this report and six service models, and the relationship between them is closer than it first appears. The stream determines what treatment is required, and the difficulty of that treatment determines how an operator prefers to buy it. Straightforward streams are bought as equipment, while difficult ones are increasingly bought as an outcome. That relationshi

Three quite different decisions are frequently collapsed into one when a produced water treatment project is described. The first is where a technology sits in the treatment sequence, which the industry calls the stage. The second is how the equipment is physically packaged and delivered, which is the installation format. The third is why the project exists at all, which is the project ty

Produced water is the water lifted from a reservoir together with oil and gas, and it is the largest volume stream any oil and gas operation handles. Fifteen treatment technologies appear in this report, and buyers new to the subject frequently approach them as a list of competing options. That reading is misleading, because they remove different material and occupy different positions in wh

The companies serving this market are not variations on one business, and grouping them by type explains the landscape better than any list. Four types appear: automation and electrical engineering specialists, Brazilian grain equipment manufacturers, international grain systems groups, and process technology groups. Each occupies a different position within the Brazil grain dryer control pa

Five customer scales appear in this report, running from small farms through to industrial processors. The difference between them is not simply how much they buy but what kind of thing they are buying at all. A small farm is buying a panel, while an industrial processor is buying an engineered and supported automation system. Those are different products sold through different channels,

Grain drying equipment is used for a few weeks a year and idle for the rest, which is unusual among industrial installations. Everything commercial about this market follows from that fact rather than from any characteristic of the equipment. Control equipment has to be delivered, installed and commissioned before the crop arrives, because afterwards the machine cannot be stopped. A suppl

A control system can only act on what it knows, and what it knows comes from the measurements taken across the installation. That makes monitoring content the practical determinant of what any automation level can actually deliver. A fully automated system with limited measurement is constrained in a way that no amount of controller capability overcomes. Monitoring is therefore the more i

A grain dryer reduces the moisture in harvested grain to a level at which it can be stored, and it does that by moving heated air through the grain. That description conceals a machine with several distinct systems, each of which needs controlling and none of which works usefully alone. Heat has to be produced, air has to be moved, grain has to be conveyed through the machine, and the whole

Providers across the French public sector employee protection insurance market fall into four groups: public sector specialist mutual organisations, large generalist mutuals, social protection groups, and insurance companies and specialist insurers. Territoria Prévoyance is this report's sponsor, named here as a participant in the landscape rather than positioned as one competitor am