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Urban Oil Lease

Problems

  • Problems in the Amine Plant made it difficult for the operators to maintain the quality of their sales gas, risking a shut-in from their buyer.
  • Operators spent many hours trying to find the source of the problem by tweaking their system one component at a time, but quality still lagged.
  • Since most of the plant instrumentation involved pneumatic instruments connected to a local alarm panel, operators had a hard time identifying problems before they reached the alarm or shutdown stage.
  • Lack of electrical drawings, combined with a relay panel containing over 100 relays made troubleshooting motor controls difficult.
  • Lack of quality control, combined with lack of documentation caused environmental agencies to doubt claims that the lease was in compliance with environmental laws.

Solutions

  • Installed (2) new PLCs: one for safety systems and one for plant operations.
  • Replaced key pneumatic instruments with smart transmitters which communicated data directly to the PLCs.
  • Installed HMI with real-time monitoring and historical trending capabilities.
  • Installed fence line monitoring system capable of detecting combustible gas in the ppm (parts per million) range.
  • Installed new fire, combustible gas, and toxic gas detection systems.
  • Installed a SCADA system to tie everything together and provide operators with remote paging whenever they were away from their operator stations.
  • Provided detailed electrical drawings including:
    • PLC drawings
    • Interconnection drawings
    • Motor control drawings
    • Networking drawing

Additional Projects

  • Installed (1) more PLC to control the Amine Plant.
  • Created Modbus RTU network to collect data from the Gas Company SCADAPak.
  • Created additional Modbus RTU network to collect data from Centrilift VSDs and NuFlo flow meters.
  • Continually upgrade computer hardware and software.

Results

  • Increased product quality.
  • More productive employees.
  • More reliable equipment.
  • Better able to document environmental compliance.

Details

Client: Venoco, Inc.
Location: Beverly Hills, CA

PLCs:
  • (2) DirectLogic D2-260
  • (1) DirectLogic D0-06
  • 202 discrete, 87 analog
HMIs:
  • (2) SCADA nodes - Wonderware InTouch 9.0
  • ... later upgraded to InTouch 9.5 ... then 10.1 ... then 2012
  • 920 tagnames
Remote Alarming:
  • Wonderware SCADAlarm 6.0 (to operator pagers)
  • ... later upgraded to Win-911 (paging, email, text messages)
Data Historian:
  • Custom Visual Basic application (provided by others) with Microsoft Access database
  • ... later upgraded to Canary Labs Historian with TrendLink
Other Components Integrated through SCADA:
  • ABB RTU - TotalFlow gas chromatograph data
  • ABB TotalFlow - 6713 flow meter
  • Centrilift - variable speed drives (Modbus RTU)
  • Fieldserver - network bridge
  • Meteorological Station
  • Notifier - fire alarm panel
  • NuFlo - flow meters (Modbus RTU)
  • SCADApack - Daniels gas chromatograph data
  • Security Camera (web enabled)
  • Toshiba - variable speed drives (Modbus RTU)
  • Windows 2003 Server, mirrored hard-drives, with RAID-1 protection
  • ... later upgraded to Windows XP ... then to Windows 7
Networking, Protocols, and Drivers:
  • Modbus RTU
  • TCP/IP
  • EIA-568A
  • RS-232
  • RS-485
  • DSData (DDE communication driver)
  • KepDirect OPC (OPC communication driver)