Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) monitors its Niger Delta and shallow offshore area production via DCS’s, Fisher ROC RTUs, and Modbus-based PLCs. Data from Shell’s 3,000 kilometers of pipelines, 87 flowstations, 8 gas plants and 1,000 wells is concentrated to a central location via satellite and radio links. Shell has just announced the completion of a major transition from its legacy, UNIX-based system real time data collection system to a system supplied by MatrikonOPC, based on Microsoft Windows and the OPC data protocol.
Afolabi
SPDC’s Process Control Engineer Kikelomo Afolabi said, “MatrikonOPC proved to be a cost effective, easy to integrate and robust solution providing true interoperability that aligned well with Shell’s need for scalability.” OPC, (OLE for process control) has its origins in Microsoft’s Object Linking and Embedding technology. Today, OPC is a multi-vendor, published communication standard.
OPC Foundation
Matrikon, a charter member of the OPC Foundation, claims 100,000 installations worldwide for its 500 OPC-based products. SPDC’s system now comprises a MatrikonOPC Server for ROC to interface with the RTUs, and the MatrikonOPC Server for Modbus to interface with their PLCs. A Windows-based system collects field data via OPC, and stores data in a local Process Historian from OSIsoft. Shell uses OSI’s PI ProcessBook for reporting and visualizing its production data in real time.
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