ITI has provided control and safety systems for Centrica’s producing assets for over 25 years and to this day continues to provide ongoing service support and system upgrades to all those assets now operated by Spirit Energy.
One such project saw the upgrade of the obsolete safety equipment on the DPPA platform, completing a series of fire and gas system (FGS) and emergency shutdown (ESD) system upgrades on all the assets across Morecambe Bay.
The new systems are not only more reliable, but by simplifying the technology, diagnosis times of now unlikely issues are greatly reduced.
Since DPPA is a processing platform, the programme of works also had to minimise disruption to routine operation in order to avoid affecting production from adjacent fields.
Centrica had identified that the existing GE Fanuc 90/30 programmable logic controller (PLC)-based emergency shutdown (ESD) and fire and gas safety (FGS) systems utilised obsolete technology.
They also incorporated complex and unreliable hardwired back-up relay systems and operator interface matrices for status indication and test functionality, making them maintenance intensive and liable to calibration drift, causing loss of production through unplanned platform shutdowns.
ITI provided a new GE-based ESD system supplied on backplanes so that it could be directly mounted into the existing offshore control room cabinets.
The new GE-based FGS, which included Simtronics, Honeywell, Det-tronics and Siemens gas, flame and smoke detection devices, was built and housed in new cabinets provided by ITI.
Both systems were hardwired into existing platform equipment and interfaced with the existing distributed control system (DCS) as well as remote systems on neighbouring platforms. ITI also provided a new Wonderware InTouch based HMI for operator interfacing, providing historical alarms, events and data plus access to sequence-of-events recording, inhibit and override control.
Following a detailed design phase, ITI first began installation and pre-commissioning of the new fire and gas detection devices in May 2016, followed by installation of the new emergency shutdown system in August, all in line with client shutdown schedules. From initial isolation and destruct to Lloyds verification testing and sign-off, actual downtime amounted to just three weeks.
The obsolete equipment was then decommissioned and deconstructed during scheduled intervention windows over the next six months.
The solution was based on the same, proven systems that ITI previously deployed across all the other assets in Morecambe Bay, providing consistency for maintenance and operator understanding, plus uniformity of spare parts.
ITI continues to provide ongoing system support and maintenance to Spirit Energy’s Morecambe Bay onshore and offshore assets. As well as holding a supply of spares specifically for the Morecambe Bay systems, ITI provides Spirit Energy with regular scheduled site inspections and 24 hour on call service.
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