As technologies continue to advance, so do the opportunities to remotely monitor production sites, even from great distances.
At the Emerson Exchange conference in Brussels earlier this year, Emerson’s Stuart Chisholm team with Dipak Sagar of Industrial Video & Control (IVC) on a presentation, Remote Monitoring of LNG Facilities. Their presentation described an Australian LNG development with multiple geographically separate compression hubs and gathering systems where the operations center was located 600km from the site location. This development was a joint venture among several leading natural gas producers.
The project goals were to establish efficient processes for operating, monitoring and controlling the gas fields from a remote control center using field-proven, reliable communications technologies. The project team relied on Emerson as the main automation contractor for the project. The intent was to provide real-time data from remote wells and facilities to the operations and maintenance teams in order to optimize the performance of the wells, well pads and fields. It was also important to visualize the production process and staff for safe and reliable operations from one single environment.
The presentation focused on the upstream part of the project involving the compression hubs and well pad, manifold and metering sites. The Emerson project team worked with the Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) contractor as the main automation contractor, main instrument vendor and main valve contractor and provided project management, design, engineering, procurement, expediting and logistics for all of the automation-related components in the project.
Technologies across the operations center, hub compression stations and remote gas production sites included asset management and machine condition monitoring systems, close-circuit TV (CCTV) systems, distributed control systems, SCADA systems, solar power systems, fire & gas systems and a Well Manager operations management system to coordinate production levels.
The CCTV system displayed the video feeds from the compressor hub locations and integrated these video feeds within the DeltaV operator screens. The architecture was designed for optimal performance in limited bandwidth, remote environments. The IVC camera management software provided an open environment for integration with other monitoring technologies.
The architecture included a video local area network above the DeltaV application level local area network. A relay server/alarm server served the video feeds to the operator displays.
This remote video monitoring solution was expanded to one of the pipelines.
Remote monitoring at all the hubs is now fully operational with other identified expansion projects proceeding. This comprehensive remote monitoring solution allowed the owners to optimize staffing levels at each hub site.
The data from the well pads combined with the video feeds from the hubs improved situational awareness for the operators and management teams to improve the quality and timeliness of decisions. This helped to optimize operational costs and improve overall productivity.
You can connect and interact with other LNG and oil & gas experts in the Oil & Gas group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.
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