Attendees to the 2011 Cygnet user meet were greeted by David Wray from flagship client Anadarko who is also chairman of the Cygnet Board of Customer Advisors. A couple of years back, Anadarko was looking for a replacement for its ‘non-scalable’ in house-developed system. The company wanted to be able to add devices to its process control network without help from the developers.
The solution involved deployment of Cygnet SCADA as the corporate standard and the Cygnet gas measurement repository (GMR), a flow measurement data repository. Anadarko’s Cygnet system now covers some 250 total flows polled from Cygnet every two days. The scalable system processes over a billion data updates per day from 11,000 devices.
Wray was followed by Chris McGill, MD policy analysis for the American Gas Association, who gave a bullish presentation on the impact of shale gas on US. McGill traced the see-saw ride of US gas prices over the last decade and their current stabilization in the $4 region. All thanks to shale gas production, which has risen 14 fold in the last decade and which has tripled reserves ‘over the last few years.’ This success has meant that LNG terminal capacity around the US is underutilized and has likely compromised new natural gas pipeline construction from the North Slope. On the demand side, AGA figures that there will be steady growth—perhaps upwards of 20% over the next couple of decades—mostly from industry, commercial users and power generators.
Gregg Hurst from Cygnet’s parent group Weatherford introduced the concept of ‘hosted optimization.’ Hurst observed that today, water constitutes around 85% of produced oilfield liquids in North America and this continues to grow. Production efficiency and optimization are therefore key to future oil and gas production management. Another statistic—around 90% of active wells use some form of artificial lift, creating further potential for optimization.
Hurst defines optimization as managing production of hydrocarbons as things change over time. It comprises surveillance and measurement, analysis, solution design and asset management. Weatherford is now offering a combo of a hosted version of its Life of Well Information Software (Lowis) along with Cygnet’s hosted SCADA and other tools. This will add an optimization tool set and intelligent alarms to enhance the asset management capabilities of SCADA. The Lowis/Cygnet integrated solution will be identical whether it is hosted or run locally.
Steve Robb described Cygnet for Production (CfP) as a ‘standardized solution designed for production/midstream operators.’ CfP is pre configured for common devices and pipes data into a ‘unified’ data model. Functionality for gas and liquids production includes LinePack, nominations monitoring, meter proving and ticketing. Data is published in XML with gateways to leading ESBs. Along with Anadarko, Cygnet has endorsements from Encana and Chesapeake whose installation includes Enterprise GMR on 100+ hosts serving over 1,400 clients. More from www.oilit.com/links/1107_35.
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