One of the biggest technical challenges ABB faced with this project was automating the collection of well data. The project called for between 1,000 and 1,500 well sites to come online in 2014, and beyond 6,000 by 2030, over an area of more than 4,500 km². Each of these wells have between 50 and 70 data points being scanned on a 30-second cycle time. With several new wells being introduced every day, ABB needed to be able to bring them on and off line in a highly streamlined and efficient manner; furthermore, the method of configuring them needed to be simple, fast, and very reliable. It also needed to be able to reliably retrieve vast amounts of data from distant locations. All this meant that the automation of data collection was a huge undertaking, since the project infrastructure was immense and constantly in flux. To handle these requirements, ABB needed an automated communications platform that was highly reliable and that could easily scale and communicate massive amounts of data back for visualization and long-term storage in an enterprise historian.