“The migration project was a terrific team effort by Honeywell and Wintershall. We are very happy with the results, and with the passage of time and further integration efforts we expect to realize more and more benefits such as time efficiency, increased platform performance and reliability, ease of maintenance and cost reduction…”
Hans Reijn, Facility Engineer, Wintershall
Wintershall chose to migrate from a Bailey control system to the Experion® Process Knowledge System (PKS) on one of its main offshore platforms in the North Sea. The migration to Experion has resulted in the following benefits:
Wintershall is Germany’s largest producer of crude oil and natural gas with an annual production rate equivalent to more than 100 million barrels of oil. Focused on selected core regions where the company possesses a wealth of regional and technology expertise, the company employs more than 1500 people from more than 30 countries with locations in Europe, North Africa, South America, Russia and the Caspian area. Wintershall continues to experience success and growth as a wholly-owned subsidiary of BASF AG.
Wintershall realized that it must upgrade its legacy Bailey Infi90 system it had running on one of its main production platforms off the coast of Holland. Vendor support for the man/machine interface would terminate in 2005 so time was of the essence. This manned platform, operational since 1982, connects to six unmanned platforms and is one of 23 offshore platforms responsible for gas production. The project team overseeing the overall platform system was faced with a delicate migration issue. The team had to find a way to leverage the existing Bailey controllers already in place while at the same time migrate the Bailey LAN PCV and network system to a newer, more versatile, easy-to-use and robust system. In addition the team had to convince the operators on the main platform to accept, learn, use and support a new system that would now help manage their business.
After investigating all options and conducting years of exhaustive research, Wintershall chose Honeywell’s Experion PKS for its ability to quickly migrate from the Bailey system while at the same time take advantage and retain the company’s investment in Bailey controllers. In addition, Experion was selected based on its fully-redundant system, fail-over support, high uptime, easy-to-use and customizable interface, windows control and cost of maintenance. Wintershall also recognized the potential to add advanced functionality in the future to its sister sites already using other Honeywell products.
Wintershall’s approach was to get the acceptance and confidence of the operators on the platform through a test pilot phase and make sure that they liked the look and feel of the new Experion PKS interface. This pilot was very successful and soon the Honeywell system was up and running with no interruption to Wintershall’s business and no loss of productivity.
Another advantage to the Honeywell solution was the philosophy and man/machine interface the company uses throughout all its products. Other Wintershall gas production platforms had prior successes using other Honeywell products including DCS, fire and gas systems, safety shutdown systems and instrumentation. Operators are familiar with Honeywell’s use of graphics, style, design and operational efficiencies. Hans Reijn, Facility Engineer and Project Manager, Wintershall, commented, “By standardizing on one familiar interface, this gives our staff one less issue to worry about and makes them more productive in their specified job”.
Wintershall also recognized that by using Honeywell’s Experion system their operators were able to use a single view window letting them better organize and present the information to make faster and better decisions based on real-time data. The Experion Distributed System Architecture provided seamless access to points, alarms, operators, messages, history, etc. between servers opening up the possibility for Wintershall to operate platforms from one location onshore – “a benefit we had never experienced with our previous system”.
“The migration project was a terrific team effort by Honeywell and Wintershall,” said Reijn. “We are very happy with the results, and with the passage of time and further integration efforts we expect to realize more and more benefits such as time efficiency, increased platform performance and reliability, ease of maintenance and cost eduction due to business agility.”