Process Monitoring and Analytics: How Advancements in PID Control Loop Analysis Address Challenges in the Oil & Gas Sector

Like their peers across the process industries, engineering and operations staff in the Oil & Gas industry deal with a highly complex and dynamic environment. The requirements they face for improved plant performance and increased output are largely the same as in any other sector. Still, Oil & Gas producers are often given additional latitude due to the value associated with each unit of energy output. They may not feed the world, but they do help to keep the world in motion.

Advances in process monitoring and analytics technologies are enabling Oil & Gas operators to address critical needs. Consider the following:

Enhancing Equipment Reliability

Early detection of mechanical issues before they result in unplanned downtime is critical in any industry. However, the harsh environments and demanding operational conditions associated with the Oil & Gas industry underscore the value of advance warning. With sufficient time, issues can be validated and corrective action in the form of maintenance can be applied, preventing the breakdown of costly assets and the crippling effects of downtime. With so many production assets, it can be daunting to identify reliability-related issues and to isolate the associated root-causes. Continuous monitoring of Stiction is a well- documented and highly effective way of using controller data to proactively uncover mechanical issues. Output Travel is another. Monitoring Output Travel can reveal excessive effort by measuring the number of full strokes performed each day by a given valve. Corrections to loop performance have been shown to extend the MTTF of some production assets by well over 3x.

To know more, read our article ‘Oil & Gas: Uncovering Hidden Reliability Issues’.

Optimizing Resource Utilization

Efficient resource utilization is crucial for both economic and environmental reasons in the Oil & Gas industry. Optimizing PID control improves the use of resources production inputs such as energy and raw materials by maintaining precise control over key process variables. Doing so also limits the associated environmental impact.

In refineries, PID analytics and advanced modelling can be applied to optimize combustion processes associated with furnaces and boilers, ensuring that fuel is used efficiently and that emissions are minimized. Given the highly dynamic nature of these complex processes, traditional modelling software routinely fail due to the need for steady-state operations. However, monitoring tools that are equipped with non-steady state modelling can provide the intelligence needed to reign in highly variable behavior of these controllers. This not only reduces operating costs but also helps meet stringent environmental regulations.

Here is a Success story and Case Study ‘Are Your Tunings Refined’.

Facilitating Remote Operations

The Oil & Gas industry increasingly relies on remote operations, especially in challenging environments like deep-sea drilling and Arctic exploration. Plant-wide controller monitoring enables operators and engineers alike to continuously screen for processes that exhibit negative performance trends before they become problems.

Basic and advanced process analytics apply equally well in the context of remote operations. Whereas fundamental performance metrics like Absolute Average Error (AAE) reveal loops that require tuning, other intuitive metrics like Tuning Deviation quantify the nature of a particular PID tuning problem. Advanced utilities like TuneVue automatically
capture data from everyday output changes and calculate models of the associated process behavior. Those models provide the basis for loop tuning and for keeping remote operations running smoothly.
Read our article to know more: ‘Oil & Gas: Continuous Process Modeling and Optimization’.

Conclusion

PID controller monitoring solutions increasingly apply advanced analytics to elevate performance in Oil & Gas and other process industries. By tackling enhancing equipment reliability, optimizing resource utilization, and facilitating remote operations, these technologies address critical challenges and drive operational excellence.

PlantESP, a control loop performance monitoring solution from Control Station, specializes in providing process manufacturers with these capabilities. Leveraging available data and applying analytics with tools like PlantESP is not only a strategic move for improving performance, it is also a crucial step towards ensuring the long-term sustainability and competitiveness of Oil & Gas operations.