Remote Video Monitoring for Oil & Gas and Energy Sites
It's 3 a.m. and headlights are coming down the lease road. Nobody's scheduled. The pumper won't be back until morning, the tank battery's sitting there in the dark, and the closest person on your team is asleep miles away. By the time anyone notices, the copper's gone, a truck bed's full of your tools, or someone's been drawing condensate off a tank they've clearly visited before.
That's the problem with remote energy sites. They're spread out, they're mostly unmanned, and you can't put a person at every pad. Our remote video monitoring puts trained New Era Trading staff on your cameras 24/7, or on a custom schedule if you only need nights and weekends. We're based in Houston, we've been at this for over a decade, and we watch business sites across the USA from our own monitoring facility.
What operators watch for at remote energy sites
Most of what field and HSE managers tell us about falls into a handful of problems:
- Copper and wire theft at well pads, substations and solar sites, sometimes cut from equipment that's still in service.
- Tools, batteries and equipment walking off pads and oilfield service yards.
- Fuel and condensate theft from tanks nobody checks overnight.
- Trespassing on lease roads and pads, which is a liability headache even when nothing's taken.
- Pipe yards and laydown yards with pricey inventory and long, open fence lines.
- Fence-line activity at substations and solar sites, where somebody testing the perimeter one night may come back the next.
How we handle an incident, step by step
Before we go live, we sit down with you and write a response plan: who gets called, in what order, and what's worth a call at 2 a.m. Here's what happens when something shows up on camera:
- The alert comes in. Our staff review the video alert and pull up the live view, so we're looking at what's actually there and not just a motion trigger from a cow or blowing brush.
- We talk to them. If your equipment supports two-way audio, we give a verbal warning over the speaker. A live voice describing someone's truck is hard to ignore.
- We call your people. We contact your designated contacts per the plan you agreed to, whether that's a field supervisor, a pumper or your HSE lead.
- You get a report. Every incident gets written up with the time, location and activity, plus clips or snapshots where they're available.
Between alerts, we run scheduled virtual guard tours, checking selected camera views on a set rotation so the quiet sites still get looked at.
Sites with no power or internet
Plenty of pads and pipeline sites don't have a power drop or a wired connection, and that's fine. We can install wireless and solar-powered cameras and point-to-point wireless links to get video back from places that'd otherwise be dark. At gates and entrances, license plate recognition gives you a record of which vehicles came in and when.
Already have cameras out there? We work with many existing systems. We'll check compatibility first, so you aren't pulling out equipment that still does the job.
Many sites, one team
You've probably got more sites than people. That's normal in this business. We put all your remote sites under one account, so a well pad, a compressor station, a yard in town and a solar site can all be watched by the same team. Each one can follow the same response plan, or its own, depending on how you run things. You won't need to staff a night shift just to get eyes on them. If you're also running remote job sites, it's the same setup we use for construction site monitoring.
Get a free site assessment
We don't publish prices because no two field operations look alike. The number of sites, the cameras, the hours you want covered and the power situation all change the quote. If you'd like a feel for how pricing works, our guide to remote video monitoring cost walks through the factors. When you're ready, request a free assessment and we'll look at your sites, your existing cameras and what you're trying to stop, then put together a custom quote.