Enterprise SCADA Case Study: Pipeline, Plants, Production

Abstract

As companies working in the oil and gas industry move into the Digital Energy age, they often have to deal with legacy SCADA platforms that fail to meet the challenges of supporting their growing enterprise. Intelligent asset management across a company's entire network of pipelines, plants, and producing fields requires the acquisition, management, and manipulation of large volumes of data. Without the proper enterprise strategy in place, a company often finds itself with fragmented data and applications all across the enterprise and unusable or unmanageable IT systems. These fragmented solutions often become a liability when trying to manage an asset's technology, equipment, and people.A short list of the Technical and People Challenges include: • Addressing SCADA systems that historically were managed by I&E field personnel • Multiple SCADA vendors, solutions, and versions deployed • Challenges associated with the IT responsibilities being outsourced to multiple integrators • A multiple integrator and system approach, creating installations that are unique and independent from each other • Addressing a network infrastructure that allows for enterprise visibility • Historical data warehousing that was never in scope with future needs This paper discusses an enterprise approach to SCADA that supports distributed assets across multiple vertical sectors (plants, pipelines, producing facilities). The approach has been implemented in several CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects by Denbury Resources, as it solves the requirements for support of the process and business network, data replication, system failover, redundant control centers, and data historization and management across the enterprise. Denbury is deploying the enterprise SCADA system in a growing number of its CO2 EOR assets, which includes both projects that are being converted and new assets being added through the acquisition of properties.