The Tundra Juice; 3 Automation Predictions With Economic Outcomes
June 08, 2015
The state of Alberta’s economy has been on everyone’s mind since early winter when oil prices started to leak downward. In this month’s ISA INSIDER Top Story, the ISA Edmonton Section asked Blaine Barnes, our newly elected ISA Edmonton Section President (as of July 1, 2015), and Vice President at Tundra Process Solutions, to weigh in with his thoughts on automation economics.
Prediction #1 - Increased Usage of Remote Operation, Support and Diagnostic Capability via SCADA or Plant Networks
The current market has forced energy producers to explore a variety of cost saving methods and remote support capability is proving to be a game changer. Historically, despite the SCADA acronym standing for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, SCADA has been used primarily for monitoring field infrastructure. With increased (and increasing) device intelligence and diagnostic capability, a producer with several thousand production wells has already realized benefits not only in terms of reduced man-hours in the field, but also in terms of day-to-day cost decreases (eg. maintenance on vehicles), saving an estimated $3 million per year. Reduced field time increases safety as well, with fewer vehicles and people on isolated roads or busy highways. Operations staff are no longer required to travel to numerous sites each day, and by using diagnostic data and remote control capability they can focus on addressing sites that require attention immediately (from a convenient and safe location whenever possible). SCADA is evolving.
Prediction #2 - Automating Maintenance
Facilities large and small rely on planned outages and preventative maintenance to ensure facility reliability and to mitigate unexpected shutdowns. During a planned maintenance session, equipment can be re-built, refurbished, replaced, or upgraded. Increased device intelligence and a combination of intelligent software platforms will result in planning and preventative maintenance requirements reductions (or re-focusing) as automated failure predictions and analysis become more prevalent and reliable. Increasing the intelligence of a plant facility will eventually lead to metering and automation equipment “calling for help” before a failure occurs. Whether this data will most commonly be pushed by the device or polled by an intelligent host system is to be seen. Platforms like this exist today and have for some time, yet remain in their infancy in terms of acceptance, reliability, usage and capability. A return on investment will exist, allowing producers to proactively target areas with the greatest cost implications due to equipment capital requirements, lost production, or untapped efficiencies. Gains, regardless of size, help to offset the decline in oil prices.
Prediction #3 – Optimization of Capital Spending with the Use of Smart I/O
Engineering design will be optimized and control system installation labour costs will be reduced through the use of smart I/O consolidation distributed throughout a facility. New and existing facilities alike continue to operate based on a plethora of copper-cabling carrying analog signals to and from the plant control system. There are countless kilometers of wiring and junction boxes/marshalling panels in even the smallest of plants. For example, by using a fibre optic cable, users can consolidate the equivalent of hundreds of pairs of wires into a single strand, resulting in cost, installation time/effort, civil support and infrastructure requirements, etc. reductions. Newly released control system methodologies consider this approach, and more manufacturers are investigating solutions of this nature. This method is similar to what one of the newer field buses attempted to accomplish, but without the end device specialization. The economics to build new, or to retrofit existing facilities will improve for producers, improving the feasibility of various projects large and small going forward.
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