Derek Middlemas, managing director, Digital Assets Projects, Aveva, still remembers the time when the oil and gas industry was miles away from realising the importance of process automation. It was the start of the millennium, the oil price averaged at just over $30 a barrel – not too different from today – and boosting profit, while lowering cost was a lot higher on boardroom agendas.
“The engineering to them was some sort of nasty stuff that went on in some back office,” he recalls.
“But then the Texas City incident happened and all of a sudden operators were saying that they don’t want their people on the plant any more than they need to be to do a job.”
Middlemas refers to a massive explosion that took place at a BP refinery in 2005 which took the lives of 15 people and left many more injured. In the aftermath of the incident, companies and government bodies around the world took steps towards introducing new and much stricter health and safety rules.
“People were killed on the plant just because they happened to be on it,” Middlemas points out.
But this no longer needs to be the case. Thanks to modern engineering and product innovation, the physical presence of people on the plant is no longer required as much as before.
We now live in an era when remote control and instrumentation are becoming more and more mainstream, which in turn significantly reduces the need for human intervention.
“In a safety situation that can be quite critical. You can’t really put a dollar or a Return on Investment (RoI) on that but it’s more like an insurance policy where you are actually insuring that there is less chance of something going wrong,” Middlemas explains.
“You know what they say: ‘Mistakes don’t happen because operators do the wrong thing, mistakes happen because operators do the right thing with the wrong information.’”
To maintain your plant’s optimal performance, you need accurate, up to date data, which surprisingly enough can prove hard to source. Contrary to popular belief, one of the main challenges facing operators today is not the amount of data that machines store and collect, but the quality of this data and the way it’s being managed.
“If you are an operator and you are going to make a decision, you have to know that the data that you are making that decision on is accurate. If you look at a lot of cases where wrong decisions are made, it is because the available data is either incorrect or inconsistent,” says Middlemas.
Data accuracy and precision is without doubt of vital importance to ensuring smooth and optimum performance of the plant and the entire operations.
With automation in oil and gas expected to more than double over the next five years, engineering experts and producers alike spend billions of dollars every year on improving the quality of information generated from their assets.
As one of the largest information technology providers in the world, Aveva boasts an extensive portfolio of data-driven software, two of which – Aveva Engage and Digital Asset could revolutionise the industry’s approach to plant management and planning, as Middlemas explains.
“It is all about effectively transforming the decision-making process that goes on in a plant: from various small singular things to larger aspects of planning plant shutdowns and executing them properly, to improving the ability of operators to act and make the right decisions with regard to any abnormal alarms in the plant.”
Another significant benefit of the technology is improving workers productivity by providing the right information in a speedy and timely manner, while reducing task execution time as well.
“When you are doing a major modification to a plant you have to do that and do some engineering work and then you have to move that engineering data into the operating systems.
“We have a customer in Canada that was actually saying that they can turn something that normally takes them five hours to get the data across for particular tank projects, for one hour, so they save four hours on you can have 20-30,000 tanks to move across and through the data you can soon see how they are improving that particular ROI.”
Improved planning during costly and time consuming plant shutdowns is another undeniable advantage that operators nowadays cannot afford to ignore.
“If you are planning a shutdown of the plant and a turnaround and provided that you’ve got all that engineering data if you can actually visualise the plant, then you can make better decisions, you can shorten the turnaround time.
“That’s not just about providing all the engineering data and technical information but doing it in a way that allows people to make the right decisions.”
Brownfield projects are a major focus for Aveva at the moment due to the lack of readily available, up to date data information on older plants, Middlemas explains.
“Many of the new projects have a really good data. Whereas if you’ve got a refinery that’s been there for 20 years and you haven’t looked after its data, then you have a major problem. You have to reverse engineer the engineering data about the plant. So, that’s where very often you have to come in with a laser scan – you have to laser scan the whole plant in 3D and you have to rework the lines and P&IDs, etc.
“That’s a big challenge for people in brownfield projects. There are very few plants in the world that can put their hand on their heart and say they’ve got up to date critical data on their plant.”
“So we aim (with our technology) to filter out, or to provide our customers with the ability to filter out, all [the data] and only bring together what they need to support specific decision making process; and make sure the information is easy and accessible for all departments,” says Derek.
In process automation, big data and data analytics will remain major trends in 2016. According to Wikibon, the total Big Data market reached $11.59 billion in 2012, ahead of their 2011 forecast. It reached $18.1 billion in 2013, an annual growth of 61%, which puts it on pace to exceed $47 billion by 2017.
“The latest trends that we see have to do with big data, and how we transform data into meaningful information. Remote collaboration is a big trend which we see people apply, i.e. making sure they can operate their assets remotely,” said Yiannis Bessiris, regional business leader for advanced solutions at Honeywell Process Solutions.
“Another trend that’s definitely coming very strong to the oil and gas market is the Internet of Things (IoT).
According to Bessiris the focus will be on understanding how different assets “communicate” with each other and how to get more information from existing assets in order to enhance their performance.
“Nowadays it is very easy to get hundreds of gigabytes of data sitting somewhere in a hard disk but how do you make sense of that data?
“We have a very strong technology offering which definitely makes the collection of data much easier. When you couple this with our OTC capability, you can connect with any kind of application or solution in an industrial arena.
On top of this, we have a specific department that addresses the challenge of providing functionalities and solutions to customers to make sense of the data. For asset management, we give you all the tools and analytics that would try to predict and tell you what’s happening in the plant.
As you go higher in the application, we have key performance indicators, KPI solutions, where you consolidate your data into KPIs which are very easy to monitor all the way to the senior level.
“With all the automation that’s happening in the market, it is impossible to operate a plant without a DCS. [Automation can help] minimise the need to have people in the field. You can do a lot more things remotely nowadays. And though I don’t think we can completely remove people from the field, we can equip them better to keep them safe,” Bessiris added.
Having said this, it is important to recognise the complexity of big data in industrial operations. As Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO, GE, recently pointed out: “industrial data is not only big, it’s the most critical and complex type of big data.
“Our greatest challenge and opportunity is to manage and analyse this data in a highly secure way to deliver better outcomes for customers and society. We are developing more predictive solutions and equipping our products with sensors that constantly measure performance so our customers see major productivity gains and minimise no unplanned downtime.
“Observing, predicting and changing this performance is how the Industrial Internet will help airlines, railroads and power plants operate at peak efficiency.”
Q&A – Ghassan Barghouth, VP Oil & Gas and Industrial Segments, MENA, SCHNEIDER electric
How has the low oil price had an effect on the process automation market?
While the pricing dynamics have had an impact in driving operators to revisit their operating costs, the primary effect on the Process Automation Market has been that of prioritising OPEX (operational improvement/lifecycle management) over CAPEX (major projects/expansions).
What benefits does process automation techniques and technologies offer operators?
The safe and secure platform of process automation technologies provides oil and gas operators far more control over their ability to produce and process fuel, as well as optimises production.
Process automation allows operators to ensure the safety of their workers by removing them from potentially life-threatening situations. Automated plants allow workers to carry out a host of operations from the safety of a control room, rather than sending them out into hazardous environments.
How much of a driver is safety and security in the process automation market?
Safety and security have always been a top concern for the industry, particularly in terms of ensuring the safety of plant, equipment and people, as well as meeting environmental standards. Now, with new threats on the rise, such as cyber-attacks, there is a greater focus placed on improving the measures that are taken to protect and secure people, property, communities and the environment.
How are providers ensuring their automation products and technologies are secure?
The benefits from real-time enterprising provides an impetus to stay connected. The Automation industry is now adopting significant IT-based tools, procedures and processes right from the design stage. This ensures that each critical component that is connected on a network is either secured with a process or procedure-oriented security protocol, or has been embedded with proprietary arbitration of commands being received, to allow for isolation from other factors.
How beneficial can automation be to operators working in remote or unsecure locations?
With telecommunication networking at such an advanced stage of saturation on existing platforms, process automation system implemented with safety and security provides immense benefits for operators to not only monitor their operations in real-time, but also perform all necessary controls on remote and unsecure locations from a central hub. Process automation and remote operations management additionally delivers greater infrastructure resilience from cybersecurity dangers, as wells as enables information transparency, which helps to improve accountability at every level of intervention.
The oil and gas market can be quite conservative. How quickly has the market taken to process automation?
While this might have been the situation earlier, over the last decade, the oil and gas market has begun to embrace the latest developments in technology. This is not simply due to the availability of technologies, but also because of the increased capabilities of solution providers to proof test the new technologies more quickly and with improved reliability.
The increase in cyber-attacks over the last 5 years has also fuelled technology adoption even further. Nearly every successful Process Automation Provider in the market today offers products that are fully compliant to latest regulations.
What trends do you expect to see with process automation?
We expect the graph to stay positive, although with relatively lower scale of economies. While global market indicators are sobering, we expect spending by the oil and gas industry to remain consistent in order to sustain expected production levels with the readiness to respond to economic and political changes. The process automation market will continue to help operators sustain and improve their levels of agility.
