Yokogawa’s Oil & Gas Upstream Solutions          -reported by Ian Ramsay-Connell, Oil & Gas industry Consultant:

Introduction
Oil & gas is the cornerstone of the world’s energy needs. This has been the case for many years; however, production today is faced by many more challenges as the major sources become depleted. In order to exploit marginal fields, whilst meeting the challenges of personnel safety and environmental protection, solutions are required which are at the forefront of technological development.

Yokogawa provides a range of oil & gas upstream production solutions that are designed for maximum reliability whilst keeping personnel costs and business risk to a minimum and optimizing the management of remote facilities. These are solutions which reduce the business risk for the full lifecycle of the field operation. The solutions cover offshore (fixed platform and FPSO), onshore, and pipeline facilities, with integration of systems across these areas.

To remain at the forefront of the automation market requires a commitment to product development, innovation, and customer support of the highest order. Yokogawa maintains this commitment as follows:

Product Development
Yokogawa invests 9% of net sales into research and development. This is a long-standing commitment which has resulted in process control and safety solutions that ensure maximum production availability.

Lifecycle costs are minimized due to Yokogawa’s commitment to system migration and integration. There are Yokogawa customers with control systems dating back to 1975 that coexist with the latest automation solutions and have common operator stations.

Oil & gas fields are primarily in remote locations which often have extreme climates and difficult working conditions, hence system reliability is a key attribute. Yokogawa’s solutions for oil & gas upstream include components that are manufactured to meet the demands of extreme cold and heat, and for mounting in explosive atmospheres.

Facilities for enhanced diagnostics with remote monitoring and repair further reduce the cost of operating remote facilities such as wellheads and subsea systems. A constantly developing technology roadmap driven by market requirements ensures that the needs of upstream operators are met.

Innovation
Yokogawa has been the forerunner in a range of upstream applications with a program of introducing innovative solutions for operating problems. Yokogawa provided the worlds’ first subsea high integrity pressure protection system (HIPPS), and this reduced flowline manufacturing costs by $20 million. To date over 90% of SIL Certified subsea HIPPSs have been supplied by Yokogawa.

Yokogawa also supplied the heart of the world’s first fully digital subsea metering system, utilizing FOUNDATION fieldbus™ technology. A metering system comprising Yokogawa’s STARDOM controller and EJX pressure transmitter is highly accurate and is guaranteed to operate for 10 years without needing calibration. STARDOM is a very powerful yet compact controller with embedded FOUNDATION fieldbus and a resident Java HMI, which can be accessed in numerous ways to perform remote maintenance.

Yokogawa is developing solutions to improve upstream production that include high resolution pipeline leak detection, fiber-optic-based distributed pressure sensing, high reliability wireless instrument networks, fieldbus fire & gas systems, and many other initiatives.

Yokogawa is also investigating techniques to improve the process of specifying and engineering solutions in order to reduce systematic errors arising from the definition of operator requirements (an area recognized as a prime source of errors that lead to incidents), thereby reducing operator risks.

Customer Support
Automation solutions must address lifecycle issues. Yokogawa oil & gas upstream solutions are intended to cover the entire life of a system, from concept to de-commissioning. This is provided by a range of automation services, geographically distributed support organizations, and manufacturing techniques and technologies for remote support.

Yokogawa has offices in 30 countries, and maintains a world headquarters in Japan and regional headquarters (RHQs) in China, Singapore, the Middle East, The Netherlands, and the USA. Each RHQ is equipped with a response center capable of remotely handling escalated service and support requests from offices in the region, and these centers can access Yokogawa systems in virtually any upstream production location (including subsea) for quick diagnosis, advice, and repair.

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