Process control system

Little knowledge of process control system in oil industry
The increasing demand of oil and gas suppliers frequently requires the design and execution of very large production and processing plants over remote locations with harsh environmental conditions and challenging logistics. The adoption of cabling to fully interconnect machines and monitor/control large number of processes is becoming unfeasible due to the high fluctuations of installed industrial wiring costs. The opportunity to replace cabling by deploying a wireless sensor network (WSN) is now becoming of strategic interest for most oil contractors project. The installation of wireless sensor may give significant cost savings for a variety of typical plants such as revamping /expansions of existing facilities, storage tanks, utilities like water treatment, interconnecting lines, manifolds, high stacks, etc. In addition, the full plant coverage with WiFi and WSN opens the door to many new applications which are going to be requested by the end users in the near future. Therefore, developing consistent design methodologies for the deployment of the wireless sensor network system is becoming mandatory for most oil contractors to monitor the technology supplier/vendors during every phase of the wireless system setup and testing. Breakeven oil prices are the primary driver behind the oil and gas industry’s investment in digital technologies, such as advanced analytics to bring more intelligence from wells to above ground. For years, the oil and gas industry has been plagued with disparate systems and data sources, which added to costs. This push crosses both international oil companies and national oil companies and conventional and unconventional oil and gas resources.
A crude oil refinery is a group of industrial facilities that turns crude oil and other inputs into finished petroleum products. A refinery's capacity refers to the maximum
amount of crude oil designed to flow into the distillation unit of a refinery, also known as the crude unit. Crude oil is made up of a mixture of hydrocarbons, and the distillation process aims to separate this crude oil into broad categories of its component hydrocarbons, or "fractions." Crude oil is first heated and then put into a distillation column, also known as a still, where different products boil off and are recovered at different temperatures.
Achieve this goals, a large process control system is used in monitoring process factors like the temperature, pressure and fuel levels enabling the operator of the processing plant to equip himself with enough information so as to tell him on the next step of action to take. This steps of actions could be (eg reducing the amount of gas inlet to a particular boiler, increasing the amount of fluid for cooling system to drop the process temperature and lots more).
In the absence of process control , plant operators have to physically monitor performance values and the quality of outputs to determine the best settings on which to run the production equipment. Maintenance is carried out at set intervals. This generally results in operational inefficiency and unsafe operating conditions.
Process automation simplifies this with the help of sensors at thousands of spots around the plant that collect data on temperatures, pressures, flows and so on. The information is stored and analyzed on a computer and the entire plant and each piece of production equipment can be monitored on a large screen in a control room.
Plant operating settings are then automatically adjusted to achieve the optimum production. Plant operators can manually override the process automation systems when necessary.In Usual practice, as done in Portharcourt refinery (Africa’s largest refinery) , the personnels at the control room monitors the mentioned processing parameters ensuring that they avoid use of excessive energy, loss of much amount gas, and causation of accidents that could occur.
Process control optimization is simply the process of making the entire system for reading and sending processing conditions parameters to the personnels at the control room, more efficient and automatic through wireless medium and still achieve the same result of similar function to wired system at reduced cost.
The project is just aimed at creating a new system that will phase out the already existing wired system connected several kilometres from the processing station to the control room, and one which is such as to meet with the modern engineering design practice of the 21st century.