PDO integrates asset monitoring of 75 sites

Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), the country’s largest oil and gas producer, says it is integrating its entire asset monitoring system with the creation of an Integrated Operations Centre (IOC). Khalifa al Aamri, senior control and automation (C&A) engineer at PDO revealed the creation of a centralised dashboard of the company during the Emerson Exchange 2022 conference held last week in Grapevine, Texas, USA.

During the session on Integrated Asset Management System (iAMS), Khalifa al Aamri, Jagannathan Malligeswaran, engineering manager at Emerson and Pankaj Mumgain, Plantweb Business Development Manager at Emerson, elaborated the company’s integration of asset monitoring across the organisation.

“We need to cover these sites because most are run by local operators during the day but run unmanned at night. The vision for our Integrated Operations Centre (IOC) was getting all our assets to collaborate, so we needed a centralised dashboard that everyone could focus on,” said Al Aamri.

“The challenge was each has different controls from different OEMs, such as Emerson, Schneider Electric, Yokogawa and Honeywell. They also have different protocols, such as HART, Foundation Fieldbus and others, and all this prevented predictive maintenance because we had no dashboard,” he added.

The Integrated Operations Centre project, which centralises ownership of operational issues and enhances visibility of optimisation opportunities across the PDO network, is a step towards achieving the company’s aspiration to become a High Reliability Organisation (HRO) and to take its equipment reliability and availability to world-class levels. There was a significant reduction in alarm rates at all assets. Integrity Operating Windows have been established for critical assets and exception-based surveillance has started to review process parameter deviations.

The 75 control facilities manage the entire operations of PDO, and each has its own distributed control systems (DCS) with hosts from different suppliers. PDO uses traditional condition monitoring equipment with assets connected at each site, but each of the 75 sites had a separate control room. The Integrated Operations Centre (IOC) unites existing field-based control into one building in Muscat. All PDO assets comprising Conventional Oil, Gas, Power, Sour, Thermal, Polymer and Terminal is controlled and monitored from this centralised coastal location in Mina Al-Fahal. Based on the assessment during the Basis for Design (BfD) stage, in general Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) based technology was considered for integrating the facilities with the IOC.

The brand new Centralised Control Room in Mina Al-Fahal is staffed by production support controllers, supported by multi-discipline, decision-making Centre of Excellence. This integrated model enhances communications between field and coastal staff so that all data is visible to the operator and operations support simultaneously. One major benefit of the IOC is the physical proximity of operators from different PDO assets, enabling them for effective interactions, knowledge sharing and standardising work practices.

According to its website, PDO operates in a concession area of about 90,000 km2 (one third of Oman's geographical area) and has 205 producing oil fields, 64 gas fields, 29 production stations, more than 8,400 active wells, more than 33,000 kilometers of pipelines and flowlines and 231 operating units in its well engineering fleet, including 49 rigs and 39 hoists.