Implementation of a Streamlined and Integrated National Gas Infrastructure Surveillance Platform: From Reserves Booking to Spatial Visualization of Gas Assets for Regulatory Monitoring Purpose

Abstract

Proactive and continuous monitoring of all aspect of gas utilization and infrastructure by each operator is critical to the task of providing appropriate regulatory oversight and custodianship of the national gas assets of a country by the regulatory body.The justification for such monitoring ranges from the need to always keep track of the changes in the gas reserves volumes as reported by the operators while production is ongoing to the need to visualize the flow of gas to the national power stations from the different gas fields via gas pipelines.The scale of data generated by the operator's gas operations coupled with the extent of geographically dispersed gas facilities makes manual monitoring to be impracticable. This paper presents the system implemented for a gas regulator that automates the entire process of gas monitoring for all operators in a GIS and web enabled platform. At the base, this system provides the capability for all gas related data for all operators to be modeled and captured in a master gas data store. Gas workflows like reserves booking is then built on top of the base system. The reserve booking workflow enables the tracking of opening and closing gas reserves values due to ongoing production activities, revisions, discoveries, redeterminations, extensions, reclassifications, etc. . . All these information in addition to gas facilities information are then visualized in a web-based GIS interface.