Problems in the Amine Plant made it difficult for the operators to maintain the quality of their sales gas, risking a shut-in from their buyer.
Operators spent many hours trying to find the source of the problem by tweaking their system one component at a time, but quality still lagged.
Since most of the plant instrumentation involved pneumatic instruments connected to a local alarm panel, operators had a hard time identifying problems before they reached the alarm or shutdown stage.
Lack of electrical drawings, combined with a relay panel containing over 100 relays made troubleshooting motor controls difficult.
Lack of quality control, combined with lack of documentation caused environmental agencies to doubt claims that the lease was in compliance with environmental laws.
Solutions
Installed 2 new PLCs: one for safety systems and one for plant operations.
Replaced key pneumatic instruments with smart transmitters which communicated data directly to the PLCs.
Installed HMI with real-time monitoring and historical trending capabilities.
Installed fence line monitoring system capable of detecting combustible gas in the ppm (parts per million) range.
Installed new fire, combustible gas, and toxic gas detection systems.
Installed a SCADA system to tie everything together and provide operators with remote paging whenever they were away from their operator stations.
Provided detailed electrical drawings including:
PLC drawings
Interconnection drawings
Motor control drawings
Networking drawing
Results
Increased product quality.
More productive employees.
More reliable equipment.
Better able to document environmental compliance.
Details
Client: Venoco, Inc. Location: Beverly Hills, CA
PLCs:
(2) DirectLogic D2-260
192 discrete, 82 analog
HMIs:
(2) SCADA nodes - Wonderware InTouch 9.5
850 tagnames
Remote Alarming:
Wonderware SCADAlarm 6.0 (to operator pagers)
Data Historian:
Custom Visual Basic application (provided by others) inserts essential data into a Microsoft Access database
Other Components Integrated through SCADA:
ABB RTU - TotalFlow gas chromatograph data
ABB TotalFlow - 6713 flow meter
Meteorological Station
Notifier - fire alarm panel
SCADApack - Daniels gas chromatograph data
Security Camera (web enabled)
Variable Speed Drives
Windows 2003 Server, mirrored hard-drives, with RAID-1 protection
