Several applications have been proposed for Wireless sensor networks. These include habitat monitoring, structural health monitoring, pipeline (gas, water, and oil) monitoring, precision agriculture, active volcano monitoring, and many more. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposals, researchers have developed prototypes and deployed them into real-world environments. Even though each prototype was developed for a specific sensing task, interestingly most of the networks share several characteristics in common. Some of these are: The need for time synchronisation, high sampling rate of short duration, multi-hop routing, periodical sampling and sleeping, and medium access control. Whereas there are a plethora of existing and proposed protocols to address these issues, each prototype chooses to address the issues in a proprietary manner. The lack of reuse practice poses a generalisation problem. In this paper we motivate toxic gas detection during oil exploration and refinery and demonstrate how existing or proposed protocols can be??employed to establish a fully functional network. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive energy model to evaluate the feasibility of employing wireless sensor network for the monitoring task.