Hello, I work for a small Oil & Gas producer in the central US. I would love to hear from other Oil & Gas people to discuss how they are using Ignition.
We use a cellular edge of network unit for each of our remote locations. Depending on the location I may monitor Tank Level, Separator Pressure, Flowline Pressure, Injection line pressure, AC Power. We also use
the Schneider Altivar Process drive(we communicate directly with them through Modbus/Tcp). If we have a drive or 2 installed I will monitor Voltage, Current, Hz, Running/Not Running, and the Input Status of the Digital Inputs and the Fault code table. This allows me to send out the exact fault (SMS/Email) should the drive fault.
I have (1) VCU (vapor Combustion Unit) that I monitor Temperature and the Vacuum pressure on the tanks.
What are some of the other oil & gas user’s looking at?
There’s plenty of O&G people working on interesting things with Ignition and Ignition Edge/MQTT but I don’t know if they’re all hanging out in the forum or sharing freely.
I’m not looking for anything is particular, I just wanted to maybe share some Ideas, what type of sensors do you use? What brand of flowmeter? Do you trend FlowRate? How do you control your Injection pumps?
Do you record your daily production? What database?
Just things in general on what other oil & gas people are using.
We monitor basically everything. Flowmeter’s, PLC’s, Rod Pump’s, VSD’s, Plunger Lift, etc.
Yes, a few different methods on recording data. In some instances we store daily production in a database table. In some systems I have worked on we export it daily to a production accounting system and don’t store it. Just depends on what the customer wants.
One of the coolest things I have done is create a route alarm scheduling tool using the equipment schedule component to allow the Foremans the ability to plot out alarm scheduling for a whole month, or more. Basically they make entries into the database and Ignition takes care of moving people into and out of rosters and make sure that they are set to receive alarms at the correct time.
In the best Ignition tradition we started work on one system to monitor production data for an oil & gas customer and have since added multiple other projects to help run just about every part of the company.
These include:
Wellhead monitoring
Production monitoring, including lots of reporting
On-site generation monitoring
User interface for the on-site fuel station
Monitoring of water supply and SWD, including RFID identification for drivers
Control of access to rest facilities
Central information store used to hold asset and maintenance data
The more we put in the more ideas the customer has to add something else. All these systems run on a redundant pair of Ignition servers running Ubuntu Linux, with a pair of MySQL servers providing data storage. For new installations we use Debian Linux and MariaDB.
As anyone ever heard of ignition being deployed on the Drilling Rig side of things?
I used to work on an oil rig as a deckhand throwing chains years ago when it was booming… We often had our rigs fitted with really expensive solutions from companies called Pason and NOV. At the expense of the Oil company you drilled for. They charged like 1200$ or more a day for these systems. They were so simple too. Like count rpm of top drive, monitor tanks, connect to Detroit motors, monitor BOP and so on.
I think some of the bigger guys have their own solution nowadays. Like Nomac, H&P and Patterson. All they did back then was talk to the company mans trailer on site and to the rig on site. The company man used the data in his daily report back to wherever they were out of. Usually Houston.
I don’t work in O&G anymore this was before I went to school. Just curious more or less. Good Thread!
I also work in oil and gas. The machines we have move around a lot from project to project, offshore to land and back and forth etc.
Im monitoring the machines, no control via ignition but I do have means of remote parameter viewing and adjusting etc. I monitor pressures, temps, component run hours, filter hours, motor start stops and lots more stuff trying to build trends. Somewhat of a crude ML to ultimately replace parts before history tells us a part will fail.
Biggest challenge was keeping it all connected either via site WiFi or cell modems. So every machine is connected via MQTT back to a cloud based ignition server and a VPN network. Same VPN network also lets me remote access the machine / PLC’s, apply updates etc.
As I mainly monitor everything In hours run the messages are sent every hour, just the basic stuff. But I also programmed ignition to be able to send a MQTT message to the machine on a button push, to have the machine send a more in-depth MQTT transmission when requested. This was the biggest factor in keeping data overhead low. Perspective was a game changer as the operator can now open the app, scan the QR code on the machine, view past data or request more information if they are having any problems with the machine etc.
As with every project it starts with a simple idea and it quickly grows arms and legs.
A good and recent example of the benefits to this. I recently had a hydraulic pump motor fail after 400 hrs, only a small 5hp motor. We typically change it every 2k hours so this one caught us off guard. Closer inspection we seen that it had been stopped and started way more then usual, the operator was stopping and starting the motor every few minutes, over a span of days. Turns out they didn’t like the noise so they would stop the pump every chance they had. That’s a brief summary but benefits of capturing data that at the time seems irrelevant, is valuable later on.
What was the incremental cost involved in such remote monitoring configuration (the edge devices used, the MQTT modules used etc,) and what was the ROI?
We NOW can see this type of activity and then get on top of the problems.
We had pumpers (Contract) that would not show up for days, but fill out the report as if they was
there everyday. Didn’t take long to catch this type of abuse.
Over the weekend we had a main flow line break, now this is from a field that makes 3600 barrels of water a day, as soon as the pressure drop below our setpoint the fieldkill was triggered and alarms sent out to all needed personnel.
We probably prevented a $150,000.00 clean up!!!
All of the location/wells that have our pump controller installed we know the instant belt’s break, rod part, electrical problems, so these problems get taken care of then not day’s later when pumper finally see’s
a problem (And all the lost production - ROI??)
We have paid for our scada system many times over already!!