Produce more oil to meet rising global demand whilst simultaneously cutting operational costs. This is no small feat to undertaken, especially within a mission-critical industry where demand is always on the up-and-up.
Yet, our customer, GSYS – a leading process automation & safety systems superstar, accepted this challenging mission to create custom-built containerised control & power distribution centres that were to be deployed at multiple oil separation plants across Venezuela.
But there was a catch…
These fully integrated power and control centres needed to be rapidly deployed at the customers oil separation facilities with immediate effect to keep downtime to an absolute minimum as the Venezuelan oil refiner couldn’t afford to unnecessarily shut down any of its plants which collectively processed over 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
To give a little perspective, the market value for a barrel of oil during the time of this project was valued at $71.17. So, if these plants lost for a full day’s production output, they would lose an estimated total of $7.1m.
A refining partnership
With little room for error or delay, GSYS needed to partner with a reliable industrial automation & controls distributor that they could depend upon to meet their extremely stringent delivery requirements.
Since this project was technically complex, their chosen partner also had to provide on-going technical support on the products they supplied throughout the project’s lifecycle. Fortunately for them, GSYS chose to partner with Underwoods.
Shipping out success
To overcome the challenge of rapid deployment, the required power and control centres were housed in bespoke 40ft shipping containers. Each container suite included its own dedicated control room to monitor each of the plants overall activities, a comprehensive PLC room, a Main Switchgear room for power distribution purposes, and multiple Motor Control Centre (MCC) rooms.
All container suites were fitted with independent process control systems that quickly detected any faults which would result in a loss of production since downtime was deadtime within oil separation facilities.
Maintaining the safety all plant personnel and minimising the environmental impact of each plant’s operations were also of critical importance. To cater to these demands, GSYS configured an Emergency Shutdown Systems (ESD) to quickly defuse potential catastrophic failures & automatically shutdown the plant in the event of danger.
This formed part of the overall Fire and Gas System (F&GS), allowing the oil refiner to meet its critical infrastructure protection requirements as well as immediately detecting hazardous events, alert personnel and rapidly initiate the ESD to limit the consequences of a critical event.
Crude Control
GSYS decided to use a PLC-based Fire and Gas system, enabling system scalability in an inexpensive manner should the size of the system need to be increased in the future.
A PLC-based system also helped to unify the ESD and the F&GS onto a single platform, giving engineering and maintenance teams a common tool whilst driving down operational risk and costs.
The system was based upon the Siemens S7 416H CPU’s, ET200S and ET200M IO since this configuration facilitates high fail-safe functionality and offers hot standby for automatic reaction-free switching to the standby unit in the event of a fault.
The high availability of the SIMATIC S7 PLC boasts continued operation even when parts of the controller have failed due to one or more faults, meaning this system requires little supervision.
Driving Down Energy Usage
Further process optimisation was achieved through the seamless integration of Variable Speed Drives (VSD), Soft Starters and Direct on-line Starters.
The VSD’s enhanced the energy proficiency of each separation plant and the Soft Starters helped to combat electrical stresses and line voltage sags associated with the plant’s previous full voltage motor start-ups.
By using VSDs, the Venezuelan oil refiner gained the ability to reduce each plants energy consumption by up to as much as 70% thus, significantly lowering each plant’s overall energy usage costs.