Next-generation supervisory control (SCADA) systems are able to impart “context” to data aggregates, for further use in historians, alarm management, and enterprise resources planning. (Image courtesy CygNet)

The global upstream oil and gas (O&G) industry is serviced by hundreds of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) vendors. For most O&G industry professionals, SCADA has had a clearly defined, relatively unchanging role in production operations.

In simplest terms, SCADA denotes a computer system for monitoring — and sometimes controlling — a process. It also includes an interface, remote terminal units, and communications infrastructure.

By contrast, in manufactured-goods industries, such as automotive or electronics, while there used to be a multitude of SCADA vendors, today there are little more than a handful of meaningful players. Furthermore, changes in these manufacturing systems’ technology underpinnings, and the resulting expansion in uses and scalability, have taken the SCADA concept far beyond its original purpose.

O&G software vendors are well aware of what has transpired in manufacturing the last several years, and they’re betting that something very similar is going to happen in O&G, i.e., the deployment, by operators, of “an information ecosystem” that extends across all operations systems and into the business enterprise.

On the other hand, skills-driven, engineering-intensive O&G is more advanced than manufacturing and other industries when it comes to using models — for physics, production management, and asset management — to optimize processes. Here, however, another technology being applied extensively in other industries, i.e., services-oriented architecture (SOA), already is making O&G models more useful in real-time decision support.

One issue that needs to be addressed, and one that is increasingly recognized as urgent by governments and many industries, is “cyber security.” Indications are that Internet-based criminal activity, some of it quite organized, is growing. And reports indicate it is just these new technologies under discussion that could potentially increase industry vulnerability to cyber attack.

Commercial availability

Two vendors that already have “information ecosystem” solutions on offer are Landmark and CygNet.

Mark Lochmann, director, production optimization, Landmark, said the O&G SCADA market hasn’t consolidated due to the industry’s tradition of asset independence. “With instruments spread out over hundreds of thousands of acres, the manager at the site tends to go to the local vendors.”
This also points to the fact that the O&G SCADA market today is as much driven by services provision as the sale of software licenses, added Steve Robb, vice president of business development, CygNet.

According to Robb, O&G operators see increasing value in the idea of an information ecosystem because of the vast amounts of data being generated at production sites and the need to contextualize that information for use in business systems. The goals are better operations decisions, increased market responsiveness, and regulatory compliance.

“Cygnet Enterprise” collects data from field devices much like traditional SCADA systems do. But it introduces a unified data model to impart context to the data gathered so it can be further used in historians, alarm management systems, calculation engines, and the like. And it allows replication of the data to ease distribution to the entire community of interested parties, including even sales and marketing.

Landmark isn’t a SCADA vendor, but it describes its “DecisionSpace for Production” solutions as one that provides a “holistic model-centric integrated production environment.” It says its application can alleviate inefficiencies following from suboptimal field development, performance degradation, and challenges related to facility availability and operating configuration.

“We have chosen to approach this from an SOA [services oriented architecture] standpoint,” said Lochmann. “There are lots of data in the field and there are lots of applications. You want an infrastructure that supports moving from this fragmented environment to one that is unified. Data is distributed by means of federation, and the metadata model means the information can be readily consumed.”

One issue sure to be debated over time is that of data “replication” versus “federation.” The last thing most IT managers want to do is introduce a new database as a means to synchronize those already in place. Federation of data addresses this concern. On the other hand, says Cygnet President and CEO Chris Smith, “You have two type users: those making real-time decisions and those doing other things with the data. For safety reasons, you may want to keep those groups of users separate. And there are practical limitations to the topologies of our customers.”

Makers of models

While there are similarities between the two solutions, it’s not being suggested that they are anywhere near identical. To start, it might be fair to say that CygNet is taking a “bottom-up” approach to delivering production information to the business, while Landmark is taking a “top-down” approach aimed at the intersection of model management and real-time processes.

It’s widely recognized that introduction of reservoir simulation and visualization technologies was “transformational” in improving reservoir understanding and decision making through intuitive representations of massive amounts of data related to geological and geophysical properties.

The next step, Landmark believes, entails bringing a similar level of transparency to the entire production value chain, including the data-rich production environment. Such transparency, attained by means of DecisionSpace for Production, brings together a number of elements:

• A production data management system that provides infrastructure, as well as metadata models representative of the asset’s physical taxonomy;
• A distributed workflow platform that allows access to and dissemination of data;
• Rigorous physics models, such as reservoir and pipeline-network simulation, used for production optimization; and
• An integrated asset model incorporating both production data and physics model “proxies” that is managed by the workflow platform.

The issue of bringing the physics simulators into a common model is an interesting one.

DecisionSpace for Production incorporates model predictive control, but looks to overcome some of its limitations, as well as those that would be found from linking individual, existing, full-physics simulators into an integrated asset model. It does so using an advanced data-modeling technology sometimes called “surrogate” or “proxy” modeling.

Through data generated from each simulation using a design-of-experiments, a proxy of each is created with an artificial neural network. Once each proxy model is created the proxies can be linked via optimization solvers and made dynamic using high-fidelity historical data, e.g., well tests.

The benefits of this approach include accuracy consistent with the simulation model; nonlinearity; speed; i.e., less than a minute for the entire operational asset optimization model (OAOM); a continuous function linked to feasible path nonlinear optimizers; and non-disruption of individual engineering discipline work practices.

Landmark says multiple real-world examples have been used to credibly demonstrate the methodology for creating and deploying the proxy OAOM decision-support solution.
Lochmann concluded, “It seems to me that for the first time we have a commercially available technology that solves this fragmentation problem. While these problems are already being tackled in other industries, it’s important for the O&G audience to educate itself as to the changes coming.”

The looming challenge

Unfortunately, one possible inhibitor to extensive advanced IT deployments in O&G is that “cyber security” is becoming an ever-more pressing issue, and some say we’re losing the battle against criminal Internet use.

According to “Critical Infrastructure Cyber Security,” an Energy Insights analysis of a survey of about 200 security experts and “industry insiders” including some in O&G, who have first-hand knowledge of critical infrastructure cyber-security issues, more than 50% of respondents said that critical infrastructure already had been attacked.

The report, published in November 2008, further says that some of the latest technology applications are exactly the ones most likely to increase vulnerability to cyber attacks, including as follows:
• Deploying “intelligent” devices such as sensors and actuators, which increase the number of intrusion “access points”;
• Deploying IP-based communications networks, including IP-based SCADA systems, public wireless networks, and mesh networks;
• More integration between operational and corporate networks; and
• Greater reliance on “standard” or commodity IT platforms, especially the migration of network automation and control systems from Unix to Microsoft platforms.

Help may be on the way, however. A report published in December, 2008, prepared under the auspices of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and titled
“Securing Cyberspace in the 44th Presidency,” says that cyber-security is one of the nation’s most significant security threats. The report proposes appointment of a cyber-security “czar” by the Obama administration and stepped-up regulation of the Internet. Already, the federal government is committed to spending more than US $30 billion in the next seven years to enhance computing security.