Barry D. Payne and Associates Inc. Monthly Newsletter

April 2010

Operations Insights:

Upset management controls improve operations reliability

While processing plants are typically designed for steady state conditions, these plants tend to experience frequent and sometimes unpredictable influences from an imperfect world. Every gas processing plant experiences upsets during a typical year, from feed and pipeline pressure variances, to equipment trips and device failures, and including outside influences such as weather changes. When upset response is delayed and is dependent on operator intervention, these upsets can result in hazardous conditions, off-spec products, emission events, production loss, and/or unit shutdowns that may cause equipment damage or require additional manpower to return to normal operation. The potential impact of these influences, upsets, and constraints can be mitigated by implementing upset scenarios and constraint management in the plant control system to provide a rapid response to upsets and to provide a continuous response to varying conditions.

The plant automation controller provides a toolkit to implement process control strategies that react automatically to varying conditions and sudden upsets. The BDP team has implemented upset scenarios on various control system platforms to minimize the impact of plant upsets. These BDP designed strategies have also included constraint management to minimize process excursions while honoring multiple constraints. These automatic strategies can respond quickly to many abnormal conditions and reduce the need for operator attention in the control room when upset events require operator action in the processing facility. These process control strategies and constraint management techniques have been implemented in gas treating facilities, dew point plants, cryogenic liquid recovery plants, and NGL fractionators to address plant specific opportunities for upset management control. The benefits of upset management control are magnified when a processing plant is lightly manned or partially unmanned, when rapid automatic response to plant upsets can be coupled with call-out alarm management.

BDP Inc. offers process control consulting, advanced control strategy design and implementation, and system integration services to deliver overall control system performance enhancements. Contact BDP Inc. for more information on similar control system services and process control improvements to enhance your plant operations today.

Partial List of Current Projects at BDP:

<> Engineering, configuration, system assembly, and commissioning support to upgrade a legacy DCS with a combined Process Control System (PCS) and Safety Instrumented System (SIS) at a gas plant in south Texas.
<> Configuration and commissioning support to automate multiple pump stations along a NGL pipeline in Texas.
<> Programming and commissioning support for SCADA system integration of oil & gas production and processing facilities in west Texas.
<> Process control consulting and APC commissioning for multi-train cryogenic liquids recovery and NGL fractionation strategies at a Texas gas plant.

Partial List of Systems included in recent BDP projects:

<> Emerson Delta V control system.
<> Honeywell Experion PKS system.
<> PAC8000 process control system from GE Fanuc.
<> Wonderware InTouch HMI with Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLC.