Xodus Group’s Intelligent Monitoring service is being used by Australian oil and gas company Woodside to create surveillance tools for its North West Shelf assets.
Accurate monitoring of oil and gas production is an increasingly valuable tool for operators and surveillance engineers but, until now, visibility of data has been almost exclusively available to on-site operators. For those involved in remote surveillance and decision support, the ability to visualize data and interpret an asset’s performance in real-time has been a significant hurdle.
Xodus is forging a path in Intelligent Monitoring which makes information from the asset’s data historian available to engineering and management teams by creating interactive visualization tools. Information from the asset is not only displayed in real-time, it can also be used to calculate new data not recorded in the historian. This can then be visualized even where no physical instrumentation exists, for instance via the creation of virtual meters for a process stream without instrumentation, or where a meter already exists but requires a metric for drift in calibration.
"Woodside’s North West Shelf offshore assets, the North Rankin Complex and Goodwyn Alpha, now employ a start-up sequence visualization tool created by our team of experts. It monitors systems coming online during a restart and displays key start-up status indicators from around the process and utilities systems. Crucially, it allows the surveillance team to monitor the asset start-up sequences proactively. Information can also be calculated from the monitoring sequence that determines how much downtime is associated with a particular activity, enabling it to be logged for further investigation," Michael Putrino, Xodus intelligent monitoring lead in Perth explained.
Xodus has also created powerful compressor and other process parameter monitoring dashboards for Woodside’s North Rankin Complex. The customized dashboards consolidate average operating values across a 24 and 48-hour period to indicate how the asset’s equipment has been operating relative to the integrity envelope. This provides surveillance engineers with a means to assess any excursions towards alarm limits and take preventative action for future excursions. With access to the asset's data historian and the facility's production and design documentation, Xodus creates a raft of intelligent calculations to monitor critical equipment. This includes: triethylene glycol (TEG) column performance, pump performance, operating and integrity envelopes, alarm and trip history, and heat exchanger performance and fouling.
Image of the North Rankin Complex, from Xodus.
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