ABB is leading the way in the Evolution of North Sea assets by extending the life of current ICSS (integrated control and safety systems) on platforms and providing low outage, low risk evolution plans to the next generation of technology
Current ongoing projects in the North Sea demonstrate how ABB’s ‘Evolution for life’ programme enables customers to extend the life, upgrade and expand their existing automation systems to benefit from improved performance and reduced life cycle costs. ABB’s Evolution programme differentiates itself from others by focusing on the primary benefit of preserving production process stability. The integrity of the customer’s existing installed base is preserved by providing a ‘hot cutover’ with seamless implementation of modern, robust and supportable equipment. This eliminates the need for costly interruptions to production!
North Sea gas platform
For the Armada North Sea Gas Platform owned by Aberdeen based BG-Group which produces 300 million scfd (standard cubic feet per day), ABB has developed a comprehensive five-year Evolution plan that will upgrade and extend the ICSS to monitor and control every aspect of the platform’s process and safety systems. In time the existing ABB Master System will be upgraded to ABB’s Extended Automation System 800xA which will extend the reach of the traditional DCS (Distributed Control System) beyond process control to provide total asset management. This will deliver increased reliability, improved asset integrity and enhanced performance. Furthermore, the scope of the ICSS is being extended to incorporate additional sub-sea tiebacks.
The key to ABB’s Evolution approach is the protection of current investments by support commitments and active low-risk Evolution plans. The latter includes detailed planning and coordination for many years ahead so that the platform operator can plan when work is implemented to match his business needs.
ABB ensures every aspect of the customer’s process and operational constraints are considered. The effective delivery of the high integrity evolution plan was further enhanced through the provision of experienced ABB professionals working closely with the customer’s project, operational and process personnel.
Full maintenance support
The scope of the Evolution plans for the Armada platform extends beyond the upgrade of the ICSS. ABB also provides full maintenance support for the ICSS including all field equipment which includes technical support, life-cycle planning, spares management and operator training. The next stage in the Evolution process is to systematically replace all obsolete hardware and simplify the complex third party interfaces in order to systematically introduce remote diagnostics. This will help to ensure consistent, proactive and timely interventions if and when required. Furthermore, this will provide a system portal to facilitate access for performance based improvements.