Gaz de France is a major European energy company with a workforce of more than 53000. The company produces, transports, distributes and sells gas and services to 13.8million customers, including individuals, companies and local authorities. With 28 offshore platforms in the English Channel and North Sea, Gaz de France is Europe’s number one distributor of natural gas, and one of the world’s top five providers of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The company wanted to enable easier maintenance of field instruments and early detection and notification of potential problems. By doing so the company would eliminate unplanned downtime, and reduce maintenance time and labour costs at its offshore platforms. The company made the decision to move from conventional controls to FOUNDATION Fieldbus devices on a number of its offshore platforms.
Gaz de France selected Honeywell for its expertise in FOUNDATION Fieldbus. It also considered Honeywell’s value as a vendor for control systems. Gaz de France had recently implemented Honeywell’s Experion Process Knowledge System (PKS) with success.
The company faced the challenge of improving process control on its offshore platforms. A major part of the challenge required upgrading technology from traditional pneumatic controls and discrete wiring. It turned to Honeywell for its FOUNDATION Fieldbus solution, an all-digital, serial two-way communications system that serves as the base-level network for the offshore platform production environment.
With Honeywell’s FOUNDATION Fieldbus solution, Gaz de France intends to achieve the following benefits:

• Savings in total installation costs.
• Decreased maintenance costs.
• Enabled remote monitoring and maintenance.
• Reduced operating costs through a reduction in the number of unexpected helicopter trips to platforms.
• Improved asset reliability and management.
• Improved analysis of field data.
• Faster platform start-up.

“We knew that FOUNDATION Fieldbus could offer distinct advantages over traditional analogue and discrete wiring or even other digital buses at lower total installed cost and lower ongoing costs,” said Hans Katers, Mining Installation Head, Gaz de France.
To date, six of Gaz de France’s 28 platforms have Honeywell’s FOUNDATION Fieldbus technology installed for two-way communication and remote control. Gaz de France has employed a variety of FOUNDATION Fieldbus-compliant transmitters.
In addition to the remote platforms, Gaz de France’s on-site gas plant also operates with FOUNDATION Fieldbus technology integrated with Experion.
With traditional analogue and discrete devices, operations staff had no way to tell if these devices were operating correctly or if the process information they sent was valid so technicians would spend more time verifying device operation. With FOUNDATION Fieldbus devices, users can tell if devices are operating correctly and if the information they are sending is good, bad or uncertain. This eliminates the need for most routine checks and helps detect failure conditions before they cause process problems.

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