FEATURE: KONGSBERG
BROWNFIELD OPERATIONS HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE CHALLENGING
Words: Roar Nilsen M
anagers of mature assets are expected to avoid downtime, reduce costs, comply with new safety regulations, increase
the recovery rate and cope with an ageing infrastructure. All this must be achieved with minimum investment by optimising the control of the process with existing equipment. Brownfield operations have never been more challenging.
The Dynamic Simulation team at Kongsberg Oil & Gas Technologies (KOGT) offers insight into the organisation’s commitment to helping managers meet these expectations.
In this feature, we explain more about the suite of intelligent decision support systems which aim to decrease costs and increase revenue, while supporting managers with skilled and practical consultants and engineers.
Fields are in Constant Change
Roar Nilsen, Senior Consultant at KOGT says, ‘already in the first year in operation, operators are facing changes to the GOR and WC compared to the original design criteria.’ Over the years, these changes have pushed the operational envelop further away from the
54 Oil&GasCONNECT Using Dynamic
Simulation on operational and ageing assets to decrease downtime is proving invaluable for an increasing number of North Sea operators.
design and caused challenges both for the operators and control system.
‘The operational team often experience process shutdowns and major process instabilities. Production is stopped, operators are stressed and the number of incidents of increasing trips are caused by sequences of undesirable events’ stated Roar.
Suboptimal design or settings for control systems can cause problems instead of preventing them. To analyze and prevent trips you need to examine the history of the trip: what happened when? How did the control
system act and did it act quickly enough? Did the control system react too quickly? How did the operator respond? Did the control system avoid un-necessary inter-trips and did it cause additional stress to the equipment?
Our team in KOGT has more than 20 years of experience answering these types of incidents and once we know the background we can start to find solutions. Roar says that ‘recently a platform in the North Sea experienced a major instability in the production due to changes in the WC. Kongsberg engineers used a dynamic model of the system and diagnosed a series of problems related to design and operation’.
A re-design of some of the control loops and re-tuning of the controllers was proposed as a solution. The control concept was designed, demonstrated, tested and implemented using Kongsberg’s dynamic simulator and proven to work in a safe environment. The new control solution was implemented offshore without any changes to the equipment or instrumentation (i.e. all done in the software) with an increase in the production availability of more than 10%.
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