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An installation rendering of a subsea separation system used in by adopting a new protocol.

Source: FMC Technologies

Petrobras’ Marlim feld. “We took the FMC-722 protocol, and we’ve embedded that in our controller,” he said. “So rather than having be major losses of effciency and potential for disaster. to go through a set of intermediate servers and other “If you’re trying to piece together disparate parts to approaches, we now integrate natively with FMC Tech- present a unifed picture to the operator, it is more of a nologies. We can now take our DCS and plug it straight challenge,” Swindler says. “Your goal as an automation into our controller and talk directly to the FMC topside engineer is to try and get the operator the information processing unit (TPU) and pretty well provide all the he needs to make the right decision at the right time, functionality of the confguration blocks.” but you have to do it in a consistent manner so that

CREATING ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION the technology doesn’t block his view and inhibit him knowing what’s really going on out there. That’s the chal- Like every other area of process manufacturing, off- lenge when working with systems that don’t integrate shore oilfeld operating companies are trying to create together. If it was easy, anybody could do it.” a higher level of information integration from wellhead

Eugene Spiropoulos, senior technical solutions con- to terminal to executive suite. Planners and others sultant for Yokogawa Corporation of America agrees. on the enterprise level expect current production and “You have disparate systems. You have the larger DCS information to be available anywhere. Getting all that you’re trying to develop looking one way, but then you data gathered and turned into useful information in an have the human-machine interface (HMI) interfacing environment where even the most basic communication with the skid looking another way. What you provide to is a challenge calls for a variety of solutions. the operators should be seamless. Not just the start and “Getting information from daily operations to the stop of the system. The faceplates and graphics of the enterprise level involves a conversion of paring down system, the look and feel and style of the system should of information into something that’s specifc for the have the same style as the DCS itself.” business,” Spiropoulos says. “At the top level, the guys

The larger issue is that all the different systems have that are working with SAP, Oracle, and so on, are not their own way of dealing with information. Each has interested in daily fow rate. They’re not interested in its own way of treating diagnostic functions, but all of what the pressure was at noon. They want to know what that has to be brought together into a unifed system. the business effectiveness was, what the proftability

Honeywell, ABB, Emerson, Kongsberg, Siemens, was, what the energy management situation was. This and Yokogawa have all accepted the reality at hand. involves getting information out of our control systems

As Bonner says, FMC Technologies built most of the and also out of the third-party sub-systems, and cross subsea equipment, so it’s easier to work with them and converting the information into (key performance in- use their system. He says that up until about a year ago, dicators, or KPIs) for the plant or the process that span

Honeywell would use Modbus to communicate with different systems. the wellhead skid. That, however, was a very manual “This is where it becomes really valuable to guys at operation that required a lot of work for optimal func- the enterprise level. The same way we automate the tionality. But then those DCS suppliers worked with process, we want to automate the information. In the

FMC Technologies to eliminate that problematic step same way that the process controller knows what to do, oedigital.com 138

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