Total E&P UK, one of the largest exploration and production subsidiaries of the Total Group has installed a 10000point+CitectSCADA system to provide monitoring – with full dual redundancy – of the control and safety systems for the giant St Fergus gas terminal in Scotland.

The terminal plays a key role in supplying Britain’s energy needs, receiving and processing up to 20percent of the UK’s natural gas requirements from some 20 fields.

"The Olympic Dam project in Australia was the major reason why we specified Citect SCADA for this project," said Rob Sidebottom, Total E&P UK’s Senior Systems Engineer.

"I had visited the dam and seen the massive 40000-pointCitectSCADA system that it employs for monitoring and control.

"This scaleability – the ability to expand the SCADA system seamlessly, easily adding servers as the need arises – was just what we were looking for to meet our objective of achieving 25-years more life from the St Fergus Terminal."

Rob Sidebottom continued: "We also required inbuilt dual redundancy in the SCADA platform, and the flexibility to provide emulation of the trending and alarm functions of the previous SCADA system, to avoid problems of safety and retraining of our operators; CitectSCADA provides us with both of these facilities."

Terminal upgrade

Total E&P UK, headquartered in Aberdeen, is the fourth-largest operator in the UK sector of the North Sea, in terms of production and reserves.

The St Fergus gas terminal on the north east coast of Scotland is part of the company’s onshore operation.

Recently, the terminal was upgraded, and as part of this project the SCADA system that had served the terminal since the 1980s was replaced with CitectSCADA.

The CitectSCADA system sits above the terminal’s safety and control systems, monitoring all pipeline telemetry from a dozen feeder platforms, the flow rate, pressure and composition of the gas, and also the control systems of the terminal as the gas is blended.

"We can adjust hydrocarbon levels for gas sales, monitor metering systems and perform data gathering, CitectSCADA puts it all together for us, providing all the required data in one place," said Rob Sidebottom.

Centralised data gathering

In addition to the benefits of scaleability and centralised data gathering, Citect SCADA has also enabled the St Fergus systems engineers to take the cost out of the operating interfaces to the Terminal’s safety and control systems.

"CitectSCADA is an engineer’s SCADA, which means that we were able to pull it apart and reconfigure it just how we wanted it," said Rob Sidebottom.

"We configured the system to emulate the trending, alarm and reporting functions of the previous SCADA system.

Avoiding problems

This avoided problems with safety and operator retraining, as the new SCADA system provides the same screens as before.

As a result, the operators were comfortable with the new system from day one; they saw nothing different to what they had always seen."

The operating regime of the St Fergus Gas Terminal: 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, means that the 10000+pointCitectSCADA system provides the security of full redundancy.

All telemetry links and clients – currently 10-switch automatically and seamlessly in the event of failure of the primary server.

Multi-level redundancy

This safeguard is easy to achieve with CitectSCADA; the system is designed with DCS-style multi-level redundancy, which is easy to configure and can be incorporated at all levels.

The significance of this for the user is the ability to tolerate hardware failure anywhere in a system, with no loss of functionality, performance, communication or system reliability.

"The success of this project has tremendous
cost-saving implications for the oil and gas
sector," said Paul Hurst, MD of Citect UK. "It means that production and receiving facilities, whose
futures were questionable due to the looming obsolescence of their current SCADA and DCS systems, can remain productive for many more years to come."

CitectSCADA offers key user features such as graphical process visualisation, advanced alarm management, historical and real-time trending, built-in reporting and statistical process control.

Speed of operation

CitectSCADA is used extensively in the oil and gas industries worldwide; its flexibility, speed of operation, and ability to handle from the smallest to the largest systems (450000I/Oplus), enabling it to perform remote monitoring and control of pipelines, tank farms, natural gas and liquid hydrocarbon extraction sites, and also offshore platforms.

For more information, visit www.citect.com