Set for Stavanger
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: David Morgan
  Friday, September 05, 2008

Process automation specialist Yokogawa may be a relatively late entrant to the Norwegian offshore scene, but at the ONS show in Stavanger this month the company is looking to demonstrate why its move will not only prove timely but also advantageous to the oil and gas industry at large. David Morgan reports.

Key to Yokogawa’s confidence is the launch earlier this year of Centum VP, a state-of-the-art plant information platform hailed as the first of its kind to offer an intuitive ‘unified human/machine interface’ and ‘smooth migration path’ capabilities and thus able to accommodate both newbuild projects and brownfield legacy systems.

Through Leif Kølner Ingeniørfirma, Yokogawa instrumentation has been available to the Norwegian market for some years. That arrangement will continue as the company seeks to expand its instrument sales in the area. But last year, for the first time, Yokogawa opened its own office in Stavanger specifically for the systems side of the business.

John van der Geer, who relocated from Yokogawa Europe’s Amersfoort headquarters in the Netherlands to head up the new office, says of the move: ‘It’s a little late but never too late! Some customers were wondering why we weren’t here before but most have responded favourably to our arrival. Norway is a major innovating force in offshore and subsea technology these days, which opens up possibilities for us both in the domestic offshore market and in the many other countries where Norwegian companies are working around the world. There are definitely opportunities here and Centum VP will be a key factor in helping us to establish some competitive advantage.’

For a ‘young’ supplier to break into a well-established market where the likes of ABB, Siemens and Kongsberg rule the roost will be no easy matter. Van der Geer admits he is ready for ‘a hard battle’.

‘Our systems are fully compliant with Norsok and other tough Norwegian industry standards, even in ways that are better than some of the competition,’ he adds. ‘But we see our entry into this market as a marathon not a sprint. While down the road we see real opportunities in the planning and operation of major new Norwegian offshore infrastructure projects, more realistically in the short term our targets include FPSO builders and owners operating locally and internationally who need an able engineering services provider with a strong global track record and 24-hour systems support of the kind that Yokogawa, through its Asian, US and European operating centres, can provide.

‘Working closely with the Yokogawa office in Aberdeen, set up two years ago, we are also talking to operators in both the UK and Norwegian sectors about adopting our brownfield DCS engineering solution for North Sea platform upgrade and field life extension projects,’ says van der Geer. ‘This is an area in which the company has specialist expertise and here again the introduction of Centum VP with its migration capabilities will play an important part.’

Launched in February via trade shows in Amsterdam and Orlando, Florida, Centum VP already boasted a 40-strong orderbook – including 15 from Europe and 21 from Asia – from across the oil & gas, power, chemical and pharmaceutical project spectrum before last month’s first software delivery to a customer.

Antoon Tuerlings, Yokogawa Europe’s DCS product manager and a prominent champion of Centum VP globally, says he is greatly encouraged by the level of sales already achieved before the new system was even available. ‘That’s a big show of confidence from our customers in the Centum VP system, and we believe that confidence stems from the history of our product and the excellence of our systems.

‘The borders of control with Centum VP go far beyond the control borders of traditional distributed control systems,’ he explains. ‘Besides automating a plant we are capable of horizontal integration with multiple plants and vertical integration with business domains. That’s much more than a traditional DCS offers and at significantly lower cost.’

Centum VP essentially redefines the role of a production control system or DCS, integrating plant information management, asset management and operation support functions in real time and setting the foundation for a unified operating environment.

Yokogawa views its arrival on the market as the next evolutionary step in the VigilantPlant (hence VP) automation concept unveiled under its ‘excellence’ umbrella a few years ago. Three different types of solutions were subsequently added to the company’s DCS controls: ‘safety excellence’ in 2005, ‘asset excellence’ in 2006 and ‘production excellence’ last year. Now all three of these solutions have been integrated into one ‘operational excellence’ platform.

With last month’s release of the Centum VP human interface software, Yokogawa is now starting to integrate its customers’ databases. ‘Finally we will have one real time database with all the systems we have as add-ons to the solution,’ declares Tuerlings.

‘In a traditional DCS, making interfaces to combine data between the various individual databases costs money, consumes resources and there is a big chance of introducing errors, resulting in inconsistent data,’ he adds. ‘If you have only one real time database you enter your tag number only once and that tag number is available for your operator control, asset management, historical data archive etc. It’s only one-time entry; you can’t make a mistake. It saves money and it saves time.

‘Uniquely among DCS suppliers, Yokogawa has a smooth integration path, ensuring compatibility across all systems for existing Yokogawa system users,’ says Tuerlings. Given that some of the company’s systems still operating today were installed back in 1975 – and hailed at the time as the world’s first distributed control systems – this is no shallow boast. ‘It’s one of the areas in which Yokogawa builds customer confidence, by guaranteeing service on its older systems and being able to connect those older controllers to the new HMI,’ notes Tuerlings.

He adds that Centum VP is the first DCS on Windows Vista, while it also supports Windows XP. ‘Customers have the possibility to select a DCS today that is capable to run Vista. This eliminates the risk of having to go through a costly migration and shutdown in the coming years when the support of Windows XP ceases.’

Another plus for Centum VP is its use of Yokogawa’s pair & spare reliability technology, which the company claims allows no single point of failure and maintains an industry-leading ‘seven 9s’ (99.99999%) in terms of system availability.

According to Tuerlings, Centum VP, with its unified architecture, clear backward compatibility and consistency with earlier Centum series DCSs such as the CS 1000 and CS 3000, ‘makes everybody smarter’.

‘With the evolution of systems, plant operators today can be overwhelmed by all the alarms, events and trend data, as well as the 4500 graphics on the system with projects running,’ he adds. ‘Data becomes information if you see it in the correct context.We believe that Centum VP offers a better view of the data in a plant, providing the correct information, at the correct time and to the correct person by filtering out the important information and presenting in the correct way to any user offices, including operators, maintenance engineers and plant managers.’

According to Yokogawa, quick and flexible deployment of these applications enables the user to improve the safety, availability and profitability of a plant on an ongoing basis. This also simplifies change management, helping to reduce the life-cycle ownership cost, the company adds.

In conjunction with Petrolink and Barco, Yokogawa is planning a major presence at ONS Stavanger this month, with Tuerlings and Van der Geer among the line-up of participants in a series of demonstrations on the theme of ‘integrated operations’. According to Tuerlings, the presentations will take operations on an offshore production installation as their backcloth to show how companies react to different realistic scenarios. He adds: ‘We will be emphasising not just the controls but also the degree of co-operation between operations departments and maintenance functions, both onshore and offshore.’ OE

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