Toto Pranatyasto described Pertamina’s downstream operations spanning 6 refineries totaling 1 mmbopd capacity, 145 depots, 134 vessels and over 3,400 fuel stations. This vast infrastructure had grown over the years with no single point of accountability for downstream margins or supply coordination. Organizational silos and a lack of integration meant that the company lacked a unified view operations. A multi-vendor environment, some refineries are on Yokogawa, others on Honeywell, further complicated the picture.
Pertamina formed an integrated supply chain unit in 2008, reporting to the CEO, to optimize downstream and trading operations. The result is a new downstream dashboard, a flashy single wall display located in a single operations room covering refining, supply, shipping and marketing. OSIsoft PI System was key to bringing real time data together across the multi-vendor environment and to provide connectivity to Pertamina’s ERP system built around SAP’s Oil Industry Solution. PI modules are used extensively to create a single view of the data. Specific SAP data is also integrated with PI in order to facilitate real time view and historical data analysis. The system has been in operation for a year and already provides historical look-back analysis, a reduction in out of stocks events and a faster response to supply chain disruptions.
The subtitle to Steven Kociuba’s presentation on Alliance Pipeline’s PI System deployment was ‘Excel is no longer the data historian!’ Alliance’s 3,000 km gas pipeline from Canada supplies some 2.5% of US consumption. Prior to Alliance’s PI project, data was calculated and stored in local Excel spreadsheets. This manual process led to issues with data integrity and problems of data access—key data was marooned on mission critical systems that few had access to and was proving increasingly hard to maintain. A decision was made to implement a real time data historian. Alliance’s PI System collects data from some 50,000 tags into a high availability redundant pair. An extensive PI software portfolio includes ProcessBook, DataLink and Data Access. These connect to data sources including Experion PKS, FlowCal and other databases. A comprehensive suite of workflows for operations and forecasting has been developed along with data backfilling of nine years of historical data. This leveraged PI’s Universal File and Stream Loader (UFL) and Perl scripts. The result is that there are no more performance impacts to mission critical systems and data visibility is improved from the operations dashboard. Alliance is now working on phase 2 of the project to add PI Analysis Framework (AF), Advanced Computing Engine and WebParts. The plan is to expand the user base and to automate reporting. AF is to add a tag data dictionary to simplify access for new users and support navigation of equipment hierarchies to locate relevant data. AF implementation time for the 40,000 tag system was 2 to 3 months. Business users approved the AF data structures. The project has resulted in cost savings of $70,000 over the lifetime of each facility. Had the system been applied to 60 ultrasonic metering sites at inception, a $4 million saving would have been achieved.
Ken Startz described how Marathon uses PI to model and monitor its worldwide oil and gas assets (co-authored by SAIC). Marathon has production in nine countries and product sales in 18 US states. These are coordinated through a total of 12 PI systems spanning upstream, refining and distribution. Marathon has been using PI since Pat Kennedy sold the first system in 1988.
PI helps solve various business challenges such as time-series data collection from upstream assets, data blending from six different control systems, SharePoint integration and Marathon’s ‘Viewpoint’ digital oilfield initiative (Oil IT Journal March 2009). PI’s advanced computation capability is used to highlight problem areas and prioritize workflows. The system offers knowledge management and training and integrates with modeling applications such as Kappa Diamant, Kappa Saphir, HYSYS and ECLIPSE. Startz worked through three compelling use cases of PI covering modeling of its Equatorial Guinea LNG plant, operations on the Golf of Mexico Droshky platform—tied in to Shell’s Bullwinkle PI System—and plunger lift diagnostics on the East Texas Mimms Creek field. The last shows how PI-based decision support is helping operators who were previously ‘overwhelmed’ with multiple tasks. PI-ACE now analyzes well state and identifies situations such as ‘flow control valve leaking,’ ‘insufficient plunger lift time...’ and emails suggested intervention plans to operators in a daily spreadsheet. More from www.oilit.com/links/1006_7.
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