Industrial Ethernet in the oil and gas industry
The demand for oil and gas worldwide remains high in developed and developing nations, causing a boom in the industry. However, drilling, transportation, storage, refining and export of oil and natural gas remain complicated procedures that require a great deal of industrial automation and Ethernet solutions.
The basics of drilling: A drilling platform is a highly sophisticated operation including a rig, drilling equipment, mud pump, compressor and mud and water separator. In case any of these fail, the drilling comes to a halt. In order to avoid or reduce the amount of downtime, oil companies are investing in monitoring devices so that appropriate action can be taken in case of an emergency. Industrial Ethernet is increasingly playing a critical role for monitoring systems used in oil exploration. It is used for connecting monitoring devices and sensors to transfer device data such as temperature, speed, pressure, flow density and other statistics for analysis and alerts. Offshore drilling platforms are more complicated compared to onshore drilling rigs, as they require additional monitoring devices in addition to automation devices for exploration. Hence, safety rules for offshore operations follow stricter norms such as surveillance systems and CCTV cameras. However, IP surveillance solutions like IP video servers and cameras are replacing traditional DVR systems since they offer more flexibility and require less maintenance. They also allow for more feasible and safer monitoring and control.
Well head monitoring: Oil exploration is made safer by constructing a valve system for monitoring the operation of well heads. In case an emergency like pipeline explosion or fire arises, the Emergency Shutdown Device (ESD) gets triggered off and the well head is automatically shut down. Newly constructed well heads are outfitted with valve systems that optimise monitoring while older one can be upgraded by installing additional monitoring devices. Industrial Ethernet plays a crucial role in well head monitoring and is required for providing a high-availability solution. Remote control and date exchange between remote sites can be done through fibre optic cables that are wired to the sides of oil pipelines.
Pump monitoring for separate stations: As soon as crude oil ejects from the underground reservoir, it is transported to a 3-phase separation station by pipelines. The separation station separates crude oil into oil, gas and water before further transferring the liquids to the next processing station. Data from various valves and separation systems is collected and monitored through the network. One option is to chain different devices to a fibre redundant ring topology and use remote I/Os to collect data. An alternative to this is wireless Ethernet where data can be broadcasted through an Access Point (AP) placed at a high elevation. An obvious advantage that wireless transmission has is the elimination of cabling hassles. However, bandwidth is an important factor that needs to be taken into consideration when putting up wireless infrastructure. Low bandwidth can slow down the transmissions, ultimately affecting the accuracy of the data being transferred and, thus, making real-time control impossible.
Pipeline monitoring: The crude oil generated after separating oil and gas is transported to remote storage sites through pipelines. “Pipeline monitoring” involves providing easy-to-use and real-time management systems to reduce the risk of leakage or explosion and is of utmost importance in the oil and gas industry. Pipeline monitoring is easier to achieve if an optical fibre network infrastructure can be set up. However, using wireless transmission like GPRS is also a viable alternative in case setting up a fibre network is not possible. Here, the monitoring system directly connects to Ethernet-based devices and the data is transferred through GPRS or GSM technology.
Distributed control systems
The refining process – converting complex molecules into simplex structures – is an extremely complicated process. The Distributed Control System (DCS) is the main control system used to manage a plant’s output. The production process needs to be stable and under no circumstance can the DCS be allowed to shut down during the operation. Due to this, redundant systems make for an essential part of the design of any DCS and all devices. Main and backup control stations, hot and standby devices, dual LANs, etc. – must be backed up by a redundant system. Sometimes multi-redundant systems are required in order to achieve higher system reliability and it is common practice to set up two independent networks from which data is transmitted simultaneously.
Detecting leaks: An auxiliary system is installed in refineries to detect gas or liquid leaks. Though the auxiliary system is not directly related to the production, it plays the role of forewarning plant operators of potentially unsafe leaks in the pipes. When a leak occurs, the central control system notifies operators immediately to shut down the system. In order to ensure the fastest possible response, real-time monitoring and management devices must be used. Active Ethernet I/O devices can report events immediately through emails or real-time messages. By doing so, the response time is reduced substantially and accidents thwarted or reduced.
Conclusion:
Oil and gas operations are highly complicated functions and take place under harsh environmental conditions. Every state of oil and gas exploration and production involves industrial automation and requires reliable networks to provide data collection and PLC monitoring. Industrial Ethernet can play an important role in the entire oil and gas automation and devices such as Ethernet switches, video servers, remote I/Os, etc., offer convenient and efficient integration benefits to the oil and gas automation applications.
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