48-Foot Wide Fine Pitch LED Wall Tracks Oil And Gas Ops In Kazakhstan

December 5, 2022 by Dave Haynes

When fine pitch LED video walls first started being marketed by pro AV companies, control room displays were touted as an obvious application – with the qualifiers that the pitches probably had to tighten and costs have to lower significantly before there were going to be many buyers.

Both those issues have been resolved, with competition and manufacturing advances lowering costs, and pitches as tight as 0.9mm and 1.2mm growing common. Those finer pitches make it possible to show the schematics and numbering used and displayed on vast control room walls, and minimum viewing distances for fine pitch work in a control room scenario (staffers don’t need to be seated at a substantial distance).

This is the new Control and Analysis Centre (CAC) for KazMunayGas (KMG) oil and gas located in Astana, Kazakhstan. Completed earlier this year, the video wall displays the full upstream-midstream-downstream cycle of the company’s oil and gas operations.

Daktronics manufactured the video wall – which measures 2.74 meters high by 14.64 meters wide, covering one operations room wall with 1.2mm LED. The job was sold and put in by audiovisual integrator AG Tech Kazakhstan.

“We have launched a new Control and Analysis Centre, which provides real-time access to information from a single centre. Ultimately, this will allow us to further improve the efficiency of KMG’s asset management by increasing the quality and transparency of real-time information,” says Magzum Mirzagaliyev, Chairman of KMG’s Management Board, in a press release.

“In addition, CAC analytical system is integrated with the enterprise management information system at Pavlodar and Atyrau Refineries to enable online process monitoring of equipment status, supervisory control and material balance of products,” adds Mirzagaliyev.

“Thanks to our close cooperation and partnership with Daktronics, we have successfully implemented several projects worth more than two million USD, including the construction of the Control and Analysis Centre (CAC) of KazMunayGas for which Daktronics delivered the video wall, which is one of the key projects for stabilizing the oil products market in Kazakhstan. I am sure that even bigger projects and installations of Daktronics equipment in Kazakhstan are ahead of us,” says Alexander Podvalov, CEO of AG-Tech.

“World-class, there is no other way to describe this project of KazMunayGas,” says Mathieu Verbraken, Daktronics. “Working with AG Tech has been incredible, from their early conceptuals to the realization. They provided the full solution, including the software showing the data on the display. For this installation we have delivered our 4-in-1 IMD solution, delivering best-in-class contrast and no reflectivity for optimal viewing in a daylight environment. Floor-to-ceiling windows are opposite this display, no other technology could render these colours without reflection.”

That last point is a big key to why control room operators are opting for direct view LED over more established products like projection or narrow-bezel LCD video walls. If you’ve been in an operations center that uses video walls to provide situational awareness and visualize data, you’ll recall most or all of them have been darkened spaces that allow the visuals to pop and avoid glare from lighting. LED doesn’t have that issue, so control rooms don’t need to be bunkers.