Here at the Emerson Exchange we’re now into the workshops where process automation professionals, Emerson technologists, and Emerson industry, project, and application professionals share some of their experiences.
Dave Horan, has 17 years with Emerson’s Rosemount division. Dave works with many of the engineering contractors on large projects on their instrumentation requirement. His presentation is on a shallow-water offshore project off the coast of Venezuela.
The project had a floating storage offloading, central processing facility and wellhead platform. The central process facility (CPF) basically cleans up and separates the produced fluids from the wellhead platform. Produced water and some gas is re-injected to the reservoir to help keep the production flowing.
The largest problem in this project was 40 skids coming from 23 vendors located on 2 continents. The number of possible permutation in types of instruments is huge given so many skid suppliers. This would create a real training and maintenance headache to support these once the CPF was started up. The challenge was to manage the skid vendors to standardize on a set of instrumentation to reduce the permutations.
For the Rosemount transmitters, up front planning was done with the oil producer’s engineering team to pre-select appropriate instruments that could be used by all the skid vendors. For this project, all skid vendors had the same project manager in Emerson’s Rosemount organization, to specify and purchase the transmitters. Standardization was enforced for model numbers, materials, mounting brackets, and local indicators to name a few instrument selection parameters.
The project management group provides project managers, engineers, project documentation, quotations, data entry, logistics and other functions/deliverables required to achieve the project milestones.
The goal to reduce the variations of instrumentation was achieved meeting the project objectives of an on-time project and minimizing training and ongoing maintenance.
