We engineer SCADA for Crude Oil Pipelines.

More land based production means more pipelines.

There is movement in the Crude Oil status quo. Not only did Invensys recently obtain an order to provide a SCADA system on a crude oil pipeline in the UK, but also there is a rapid growth in the production of crude oil in land based formations in the USA. The means more pipelines and more automation to protect the environment. Invensys provides that kind of automation.

We have engineered many SCADA systems on crude oil pipeline networks in the past, having quite large networked SCADA systems installed in China.  It's good to see that pipeline activity is ramping up for us again in the UK.





More generally, the Oil and Gas Systems Industry is highly developed and high capacity, high pressure pipelines are used to transport crude oil accross the county, territory, state and interstate.

The USA has approx 170,000 miles of petroleum transmission pipelines. These are the primary means of moving Crude Oil and Petroleum products around.  Normally international transfers are done on the sea in tankers. Somewhat of a revolution is occuring in American Crude Oil production, with the majority of renewed oil production occuring on state own land and from Oil Shale bearing rock. There is an interesting trend developing to see USA become possibly even a net exporter of Crude Oil in a few years from now. Since most of the new production is onshore, significant pipeline infrastructure will need to be built and extended to have the crude oil transferred to processing and refining facilities.

There are examples of large scale international crude oil transport, particularly in UK, EUROPE and Russia.

An example of an international crude oil transport pipeline is in relation to the pipeline connecting Norway with the UK.

The U.K. has a single international crude oil pipeline, the 220-mile, 34-inch Norpipe operated by ConocoPhillips. With a capacity of 900,000 bbl/d, Norpipe connects Norwegian oil fields in the Ekofisk system to the oil terminal and refinery at Teesside. Energy Information Administration.

Crude oil is a mixture of various kinds of hydrocarbons. Each well and geology will produce different mixtures of crude oil. A sample of crude oil will contain any amount of the following classes of hydrocarbon:-

• Paraffins which tend to be all the -anes. e.g. Methane, Ethane, Propane, Butane...
• Aromatics [which smell aromatic..] include a benzene ring on the end of a hydrocarbon chain.
• Napthenes which include single bonded rings on hydrocarbon chains.
• Alkenes which are linear hydrocarbon chains which include a double bonded carbon to carbon link, thus missing two hydrogen atoms.

Most crude oil mixtures have a wide range of viscosity. Viscosity matters most at cold temperatures when pumping the oil can become quite difficult.

There are some small percentage of salts and metals [some toxic e.g. arsenic] which are also transported in crude oil.

CRUDE OIL IS TOXIC

Invensys Systems, usually combined DCS, Safety and SCADA systems are used to manage not only the production or processing of Crude Oil, but also the management of inventory and detection of any spills to the environment. In the USA, operators report any spills to the Pipeline Performance and Tracking System managed by the American Pipeline Institute.[API].

Participants in PPTS report spills of 5 gallons or more plus any smaller spills to water. The spills of 50 barrels and more account for 96% of the volume. Thus, the lower threshold in PPTS results in many more spills being reported – providing a corresponding increase in the opportunities to learn from them. API Pipeline Performance and Tracking System

For real-time pipeline safety, the rapid timely transfer of data is required to provide the best information to the pipeline leak detection and transportation software systems. For SCADA Interconnectivity, the most common protocol used is DNP3.  DNP3 protocol provides a very good application layer, which allows not only the efficient aquisition of time synchronized data, but also the ability to handle  transporting large data files which may have been accumulated by measurement or detailed analytical systems.

All Invensys Systems equipment is designed to use DNP. In particular standalone SCADA systems used for pipeline protection, the RTUs and also the DCS system which from time to time requires to transfer data in parallel to it's control system.

Photo: Creative Commons Attribution to Martin Lopatka Flikr