What's New in Production

Hopping aboard the holiday bandwagon, our destination is an uncrowded corner of oil and gas production technology—the surface Christmas tree. 

In an industry increasingly driven by data, the surface Christmas tree, with its steel-wheel ornaments, doesn’t exactly conjure an image of the 21st century. 

Automation and safety consultant Béla Lipták, in a 2015 Control magazine article, took a dim view of the current technology: “The operation of…Christmas trees is usually very primitive, often completely manual.” Yikes. Beyond increasing safety, he offers a persuasive reason for automating Christmas trees, citing one then-current measure of methane leaks that, at a residential price of $10/1 Mcfg, correspond to $4.5 billion. “Part of this waste is due to… the strange and wasteful practice of powering pneumatic controls with natural gas.”

The automation industry certainly has a present under the tree. “Obviously, one could install a lot of automation for $4.5 billion/year, not even mentioning the environmental and safety benefits,” Lipták notes.

Grounds for automation. Of course, subsea trees are considerably more exotic than their above-ground cousins. Surface trees, dotting the oilfield landscape like the metallic plants their name suggests, are prime candidates for the big bucks, and Lipták thinks money could be spent on automating them.

Consider the catalog of functions that they can perform, beyond controlling flow. These include chemical injection points, well intervention means, pressure relief means, monitoring points (such as pressure, temperature, corrosion, erosion, sand detection, flowrate, flow composition, valve and choke-position feedback), and connection points for devices, such as downhole pressure and temperature transducers. On producing wells, chemicals, alcohols or oil distillates may be injected to preclude production problems.

It’s hard to look at surface Christmas tree automation without taking in the larger landscape of field automation. Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems play a role here. Used in a variety of industrial process applications, SCADA has been stereotyped in this industry as a narrowly focused tool for data transmission. Darren Schultz, ABB, Inc.’s SCADA director, sees it differently: “SCADA’s ability to collect data at remote oil and gas sites reduces personnel visits and leads to route and dispatch optimization. But the profile of SCADA is changing in oil and gas. Today, as it is already seen in other process industries, SCADA is a platform technology used to control and supervise many types of industrial processes, but also to optimize complex coordination of operations among multiple business partners.”

SCADA’s continuing role. A recent article in Control Engineering notes, “Advances in the scope and scale of oil and gas SCADA implementations are seen in upstream environments, including fast-paced shale fields. These SCADA instances face industrial processes, while also intersecting with business operations. In other words, besides being a medium for process control, SCADA supports the vital operations-coordination role. It does so by being a source of collected data.

“Automation and service companies and small entrepreneurial suppliers are betting that SCADA will be a powerful platform solution for streamlined operations, at many different points in the oil and gas supply chain. Better control and coordination of complex site operations means lower costs to produce oil or gas.”

Alas, there’s a downside, in the view of PetroCloud. “When most people think of oilfield automation systems, they usually think of oilfield SCADA… Much of today’s oil and natural gas production occurs in remote areas beyond the traditional grid environment of wired communications. Oil and gas companies regularly collect critical data from remote wellsites and production locations, typically using SCADA systems set up to monitor facilities, such as storage tanks, pumping stations, or pipelines. To connect to these remote areas, oil companies will construct a series of radio towers, which include a master station and often radio repeaters to hop from point to point and reach out into these remote areas. Because these radio communication systems have relatively low data transfer rates, the system essentially polls information one-way back to central servers, where this ‘stale’ data is displayed in a reporting software, which may also trigger alarms or alerts that are used to dispatch personnel to visit the location to investigate.”

Cloud automation. As you may have suspected, the company’s name gives up its solution. “Eliminating the upfront capital cost of constructing a communications infrastructure is only part of the story. Even with new automation technologies, the complexity, scope and length of the project development cycle, to fully test and develop a new system, with differing communications protocols and hardware devices, capable of operating in hazardous and extreme environments, requires a significant level of hardware engineering, software engineering, application layer and device engineering, web site development, and IT infrastructure and security.”

“A cloud oilfield monitoring platform essentially means that the user needs nothing more than a browser in order to use and control their automation system.” The company says a turnkey system can be deployed without the usual cost, complexity and time to deploy a large automation project. “By running the entire system on a cloud platform, companies can eliminate virtually all of the ongoing costs for software licensing, development, modification and maintenance.” 

The oilfield elves are busily wrapping a present to put under land operators’ Christmas trees. Open it, and you may get a gift of lower costs and higher productivity, automatically. Enjoy the season.