Monitoring critical assets from afar

Global oil demand will grow sharply in 2023, according to March 2023’s Oil Market Report (OMR) published by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The accelerating demand places a greater onus on oil and gas network operators to deliver oil and gas consistently and to ensure pipelines operate safely and without failures.

The IEA predicts that world oil demand will skyrocket from 710 000 bpd in 1Q23, to 2.6 million bpd by 4Q23. This demand will be driven by “rebounding air traffic and the release of pent-up Chinese demand”. These developments will place extra demands on oil and gas pipelines; transportation, storage and trading are all integral to midstream oil and gas operations. These business areas are connected by pipelines that carry unrefined crude oil and natural gas from thousands of wells on to central locations for further handling.

However, oil and gas pipelines are far from failsafe. Corrosion, cracks and leaks are all common issues that, unless rectified, can cause downtime and supply interruptions, or decrease operational efficiency. The impact of pipeline outages was made clear in December 2022, when a combination of a faulty weld and ‘bending stress fatigue’ caused the Keystone Pipeline, a major oil pipeline system in Canada and the US, to spill more than 500 000 gal. of crude oil. The accident was the largest spill of its kind in the US in nearly a decade.

The IEA’s OMR forecast highlights the importance of preventing such accidents in order to ensure the safety of staff, the public, and also the markets. Indeed, Bloomberg reported that crude oil prices rose by 5% after the Keystone Pipeline incident. That entails identifying, analysing and evaluating potential risks before they happen – but how?

Get SMART

To prevent pipeline failures or accidents, oil and gas network operators must first establish a robust framework and adhere to relevant key performance indicators (KPIs). But, this process is not without obstacles; oil and gas companies have previously struggled when implementing the hardware and software necessary to guarantee safety and performance. This was frequently because the project’s scale was misjudged from the beginning or because specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound KPIs – otherwise known as SMART goals – were not properly set.

Instead, oil and gas network managers and operators must invest in mechanisms that improve communication and asset supervision. One of the most appropriate devices to collect and process this information is the remote telemetry unit (RTU), a field mount computer that operators can deploy to control and monitor a wide range of assets. RTUs are critical to data chains, managing information flows from asset input/outputs (I/Os) throughout businesses, even up to the CEO.

An additional advantage of RTUs is managing critical assets in remote locations; because some pipelines are in the most remote locations on Earth, asset monitoring, predictive maintenance and employee safety must be effectively managed from secure locations that are sometimes thousands of miles away. For this purpose, RTUs have a longstanding track record of remotely capturing and feeding back valuable insights across pipelines, wellheads and offshore platforms.

Once installed, the RTU collects data locally and acts on it immediately, regardless of the surrounding environmental conditions. The RTU can report data back to the central supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) control room while maintaining a local historical store as a backup, if needed. The real value of an RTU is in its autonomy – it can perform self-governing control in real-time and report to the supervisory SCADA system that everything is under control.

Operators situated at the SCADA interface can supervise operations by centrally establishing and enforcing KPIs, which include set points and instructions. The RTUs then manage and implement these instructions locally.

Worker safety

Before specifying and installing an RTU, oil and gas operators must ensure the system will be resilient to the site’s environmental conditions. After all, critical pipelines cover thousands of miles, including through some of the harshest environments on Earth. The RTU is required to handle multiple control algorithms and protocols in order to communicate seamlessly with multi-vendor devices within the network, and without draining local power supplies.

RTUs also benefit worker safety. In a scenario where the pipeline’s control system must operate in temperatures of -50°C, it’s preferable to reduce the time required for technicians to be onsite, or eliminate the need for human maintenance altogether. That’s why having an RTU with extensive diagnostic capabilities and a low mean time to repair (MTTR) can be essential, helping management teams make better and more informed decisions in real-time.

This also helps in the case of communication breakdowns. Such failures are to be expected in the Arctic, deserts or other remote locations – but this doesn’t mean operators must accept the inevitable. Since RTUs control and monitor assets independently and locally, they can continue to run in the event of a communications breakdown by maintaining…

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Read the article online at: https://www.worldpipelines.com/special-reports/24112023/monitoring-critical-assets-from-afar/