Summit Midstream Partners, LP It must be industry leading
CIOReview Team | Friday, 29 May 2015, 09:53 IST
The requirements I received to design and develop a new control center from our CEO, Steve Newby, and our COO, Rene Casadaban, were very direct and simple: It had to be functional, scalable, and industry leading. Having over 20 years of oil and gas experience, specifically in SCADA, and being involved with two other control center build-outs, I had plenty of ideas for achieving the functional and scalable aspects of the control room. Industry leading was going to pose some challenges.
Most CIOs are familiar with the vast majority of the technology that we utilize in the oil and gas industry. Our Wide Area Networks consist of a combination of leased lines, private cellular APNs, satellite Ethernet connections and internet VPN. We issue laptops and desktops similar to any other IT shop. If you stack on a few Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), a SCADA system and a gas and liquids control center on top of that, you now have the full picture of Oil and Gas IT.
Last year, the Enterprise Technology department at Summit Midstream was presented with the unique opportunity to build a new control center from the ground up. During this design and build, we were able to work with technology that we had not previously had access to which made this one of the most interesting and exciting projects I had worked on in some time.
A typical Oil and Gas control center, at a high level, can be described as a room where controllers work around the clockto ensure safe and efficient operations of the company’s assets. They utilize a SCADA system to display operating metrics as well as critical data and alarms for the assets they monitor. All of this typically requires a large network of communications infrastructure. Summit’s control room is the central coordination and control point for all of our natural gas and liquids assets. From this location, our controllers monitor over 2,300 miles of pipeline and approximately 250,000 horsepower of compression in five states spread across three time zones. Our controllers are primarily tasked with ensuring that Summit operates its assets safely and effectively and within compliance of the Federal Control Room Management regulations.
One of the technology additions that we added to push our control center design to that industry leading line was to add a video wall that would provide big picture awareness for our controllers. Video walls are nothing new to our industry, but the way we implemented our video wall design, and the functionality we built into it, is industry leading.
Our video wall consists of a 4X4 (8 total) array of monitors in the center of the wall located at the front of our control center. The 4x4 array is primarily used for big picture awareness for our controllers. We provided some custom written applications and SCADA screens for our control center management to post items that are relevant to all desks in the control center. This video
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