New SCADA system for UK gas terminal

London - TOTAL Exploration & Production UK, part of the TOTAL Group, has replaced the SCADA system used to monitor the control and safety systems on its St Fergus gas terminal in Scotland, which receives and processes from 20 fields and meets around 20% of the UK’s natural gas requirements.

Aberdeen-based TOTAL E&P UK opted for a Citect system to replace the previous SCADA system that had served the terminal since the 1980’s. The project was part of an overal upgrade of the St Fergus gas terminal on the north east coast of Scotland, which is part of the company’s onshore operation.

The 10,000 + point CitectSCADA system sits above the Terminal’s safety and control systems, monitoring all pipeline telemetry from a dozen feeder platforms, the flow rate, pressure and composition of the gas, and also the control systems of the terminal as the gas is blended, according to Rob Sidebottom, TOTAL E&P UK’s Senior Systems Engineer.

“We can adjust hydrocarbon levels for gas sales, monitor metering systems and perform data gathering, CitectSCADA puts it all together for us, providing all the required data in one place,” said Rob Sidebottom. As well as scaleability and centralised data gathering, Citect SCADA has also enabled the St Fergus systems engineers to take the cost out of the operating interfaces to the Terminal’s safety and control systems.

“CitectSCADA is an engineer’s SCADA, which means that we were able to pull it apart and reconfigure it just how we wanted it,” continued Sidebottom. “We configured the system to emulate the trending, alarm and reporting functions of the previous SCADA system. This avoided problems with safety and operator retraining, as the new SCADA system provides the same screens as before. As a result, the operators were comfortable with the new system from day one; they saw nothing different to what they had always seen.”

The operating regime of the St Fergus terminal: 24-hours a day, 365- days a year, means that the 10,000 + point CitectSCADA system provides the security of full redundancy. All telemetry links and clients - currently 10 - switch automatically and seamlessly in the event of failure of the primary server. The CitectSCADA system is designed with DCS- style multi-level redundancy, which is easy to configure and can be incorporated at all levels and offers the ability to tolerate hardware failure anywhere in a system, without loss of functionality, performance, communication or system reliability.