How does your company help your oil and gas clients automate operations? Does your portfolio have adequate products/technologies to help oil and gas operators achieve automation?
Emerson has long been proud of the breadth of its portfolio and its innovation. There are vanishingly few applications in the upstream segment for which we cannot provide measurement and control technologies. Our service and support is another strength we have that backs this up. We have located personnel who work on our customer sites across the Middle East to ensure that expertise is never far away from where it is needed. What is increasingly being recognised is that, to gain full advantage from the new technologies and capabilities, a different approach is needed in project execution. Emerson’s proven Project Certainty approach delivers projects faster, at lower cost, with less risk and improved operational benefits through the lifecycle of the plant.
On that same note, kindly talk about a particular product or technology from within your company’s offering that has helped/will help an upstream customer automate a certain process.
Oil and gas operators often struggle to justify the investment of a single multiphase or wet gas flow meter per well. The need is for individual well flow rate information to be provided by field-proven technology in a cost-effective way. Based on the well profile, operators often need a multiphase metering solution that can evolve and provide flexibility over time. The fields and their flow conditions continue to change, and often no single optimum measuring method or meter size is applicable for the complete lifetime of the wells. There is a need for a technology platform that can fulfil the flow measurement requirements and one that can be customised to meet varying field conditions.Â
Emerson’s Roxar Multiphase meter 2600 technology platform has several options and modules in addition to the base version. These include Gamma, Venturi, a wet gas operating mode, and a Multiphase Salinity System. Based on the operator’s needs and preferences, these modules can be mixed and matched to suit the requirements of the application, which can be:
• Watercut trending (on a single well)
• Flow rate trending (on a single well)
• Allocation metering (on a single well)
• Periodic well testing / multi-well metering
• Comingled wells metering
• Online corrosion and erosion monitoring to optimise production and dosing of corrosion inhibitor chemicals
Kindly provide details of a particular upstream project where your company’s product or technology has helped the operator achieve automation in operations. What are some of the challenges your client faced in achieving automation of activities and how did Emerson help them in overcoming those?
One of our clients is running a multi-year project to implement a digital oilfield across an ageing asset. They have hundreds of wells and multiple separation facilities. We have worked with them to implement a range of compatible technologies on standalone projects that have yielded operational benefits in and of themselves, but are all designed to enable the greater vision of the digital oilfield.
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Along the way, they have automated wellheads using our Wireless measurement equipment and RTUs to monitor naturally flowing wells and injection wells, and to monitor and control wells that are fitted with ESPs. They started by automating and implementing safety systems for the key elements of the separation facilities on a small scale to enable more efficient and safer operation and, as they upgrade the facilities, they are expanding the control and safety systems.Â
All the data from the wellheads and the facilities is now being integrated into a single historian database as a significant data source for the digital oilfield workflows and visualisation. We have several teams of engineers working on-site every day of every week to help with the installation and maintenance of the new equipment, and also to ensure that the systems are maintained and upgraded.
Oilfield operations are very specific in nature and are dependent of the nature of the reservoir and the type of assets in question, meaning a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution helping clients achieve process automation is not practical. Do you agree with this notion? If yes, how do you work with your clients in meeting their specific requirements and ensuring that your offering is flexible enough to be customised to address peculiar needs?
One size fits none! The difference between technology suppliers and solution providers is that the latter need to understand the client’s business and operational constraints before helping them solve their problems. The former simply sell equipment. Some clients are more advanced in their approach to partnering arrangements, and we are very happy to work as solutions providers with them. Others take responsibility for providing the technical specifications of the equipment that they want to purchase and, with the breadth of our offering, we are usually able to meet their requirements.Â
In our experience, the companies that work with us as they define the solutions to their problems are the ones who gain the greatest value from the automation that they implement. In order to do this, it is often necessary for the end-users to change work practices to take advantage of the opportunities that new technology offers. But, to your point, specific solutions must reflect the specific needs of the client’s business, the nature of the oilfield and the assets that they own, and the operational philosophy that they wish to adopt.
Upstream operations are vast and varied, so based on Emerson’s experience of providing automation services to oil and gas customers, for which domain/s of oilfield operations do you see the demand for automation the most? Why do you think that’s the case and what does it tell you about the level or type of automation adoption in the industry?
In our experience, the domain of oilfield operations that shows the greatest demand for automation is related to measurement and control of the wellhead. Partly this is because, in general, the separator trains were much more instrumented already, so the wellhead is where the biggest data gap exists.Â
Advances in wireless, with standards like IEC 62591 WirelessHART, allow operators to install devices in hours and have the data on their desktop the same day with minimal planning, infrastructure and lifecycle costs. This has transformed the economics of monitoring the characteristics of oil and gas production. Advances in measurement, like the Modular Multiphase Flow Meter, have similarly upgraded the ability to see the details behind transient production characteristics in real time at an affordable price.Â
Also, well testing can now be performed for less capital and operating cost with greater accuracy and less risk using a combination of Multiport Flow Selector manifolds and Multiphase Flow Meters.
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