Organization names 2017 Plant of the Year

The Shell Prelude Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) plant/ship of Royal Dutch Shell, to be located in the Timor Sea off the Northwest coast of Australia, has been named the FieldComm Group 2017 Plant of the Year.

By FieldComm Group November 2, 2017

FieldComm Group announced the Shell Prelude Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) plant/ship of Royal Dutch Shell, to be located in the Timor Sea off the Northwest coast of Australia, has been named the FieldComm Group 2017 Plant of the Year. This is the second award presented to a Shell facility; the first WAS awarded to Shell Scotford in Alberta, Canada, in 2011.

Having recently completed its long sail from South Korea to its final destination 200-km from the Australian mainland, it will be connected to Deepwater gas wells and is scheduled to begin regular operations in 2018. The 488 x 71 m vessel’s 14 production facilities, rising eight stories above the deck and full of FieldComm Group technologies, will extract and process for transport about 3.6 million tons per year (Mtpa) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) during its 25-year lifespan.

Kyle Dickson, control and automation engineer for Shell Prelude FLNG, said, "The use of device templates is delivering excellent conformity and quality assurance throughout the commissioning process. This has enabled a small team to achieve impressive loop check rates whilst maintaining exceptionally high levels of quality assurance."

Use of advanced diagnostics and rationalized device alerts has enabled predictive and targeted maintenance execution. Prelude is in a particularly remote, isolated location and is dependent on having a fully realized remote monitoring group of engineers surveilling and advising on device issues. While still in a start-up phase, Prelude is operating vast amounts of utility and marine systems, and the benefits of an intelligent instrument management system are already being realized.

At the peak of its recent commissioning efforts, they report that Prelude’s staff was performing more than 500 loop checks per week, and checking multiple streams of complex functions. The vessel’s utilities plant was also running 24/7, which made maintenance challenging. Thanks to using templates for its parameters, Prelude’s staff and contractors achieved:

  • Total time savings of 80% for device commissioning and loop checking across all devices using device templates;
  • Time savings for the valve positioner loop check procedure was more than 80% for the full loop test;
  • Tested all device types during the factory acceptance test (FAT) in less than three days, compared to previous test using traditional methods, which took more than two days to test just three device types; and 
  • Human error during FAT was quickly identified allowing for fast correction.

FieldComm Group

www.fieldcommgroup.org 

– Edited from a FieldComm Group press release by CFE Media. See more Control Engineering industrial networking stories.

Original content can be found at Oil and Gas Engineering.