OPC Foundation for Energy announced

Data exchange standards for the energy transition. OPC UA for CCUS at Northern Lights.

Speaking at the 2023 OPC Day in the OPC UA for Energy Strategy session, Espen Krogh (Prediktor) and Chris Muench (C-Labs) introduced the OPC Foundation Energy (currently under construction!) initiative. OPC-FE is primarily concerned with the energy transition where multiple sources must combine to provide reliable, affordable and sustainable energy. Here, a challenge is the lack of standards. OPC FE is establishing numerous working groups to define data exchange and model standards for the broader energy sector. These are to support connectivity of energy-related systems, services and devices for energy production from diverse sources including solar, wind, hydro, nuclear and fossil. The ambitious initiative is to cover energy conversion, transport, storage and consumption.

One workgroup of interest to the oil and gas vertical is the Carbon Capture, Storage and Reporting workgroup, chaired by Microsoft’s Erich Barnstedt with support from founding members: TGS-Prediktor, Equinor and Beckhoff. Alongside OPC, the workgroup has representation from CESMII, and VDMA. The plan is to develop or repurpose several OPC UA information models for CO2 capture, storage, transport and injection. Metering of sequestered CO2 to evaluate permanently stored volumes is also under study. Current focus is the active Northern Lights CCS project with an initial standard for liquified CO2 storage. An overarching Energy Harmonization Workgroup is to assure common definitions and constructs are used across the various energy related working groups, leveraging earlier work on energy semantics including IEC 61850 and derived specifications.

OPC is predominantly a standard for manufacturing as witnessed by its flagship industrial supporters. It has in the past had an oil and gas presence with notably the MDIS Master Control System (MCS) . Also there is seemingly ongoing OPC activity relating to possible convergence of The Open Group’s Open Process Automation Forum and OPC UA Field eXchange (OPC UA FX).

Click here to comment on this article

Click here to view this article in context on a desktop

© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.