Cooperation with AK Transneft Oil Transporting JSC to introduce solution for automation and control of the Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean pipeline

Location:         Eastern Siberia, Russia

Order date:     2008

Completion:    2009

Industry:          Oil&Gas

Executive Summary

AK Transneft Oil Transporting JSC owns the largest oil pipeline system in the world, with a total network length of almost 50,000 km. Transneft transports about 93% of the oil produced in Russia.

EleSy started cooperation with Transneft in 1994. In 1998, EleSy designed and commissioned the distributed data acquisition and control system for Transneft, and won the Microsoft Windows World Open award for the world's largest PC-based automation project. Until now, the project has had no analogues of its scale in the world.     

In 2008, EleSy convincingly demonstrated its unified automatic control system is suitable for the Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean oil pipeline happening to become a general contractor and principal system developer.

The pipeline is constructed to connect the oil fields of Western and Eastern Siberia with the Russian seaports of the Pacific coastwise and the spur pipeline to China, and to export Russian crude oil to the USA and Asia-Pacific markets.

Challenges and Scope of Work

It was required to implement high-quality automatic control system for the pipeline with the predicted capacity of 80 million ton a year.

According to the project, EleSy was requested to design the following:

Telemetry system for linear and station parts of the oil pipeline

• Dispatcher system for the trunk oil pipeline
• Automatics systems
• Automatic fire-extinguishing system

Solutions

EleSy created a unified automatic control system for oil pipeline based on InfinitySuite SCADA system being a continuous process control tool for large scale geographically-distributed facilities.

Oil pipeline operation is provided by EleSy's integrated telecontrol solution including enclosed telemetery system and the relay-type communication system installed inside the movable container houses powered by diesel generators.

 

Oil pipeline dispatcher system provided by EleSy processes over 500,000 data points.

Advantages

The required instructions issued by the control algorithms based on the ControlLogic PLC (from Allen Bredley) are transmitted to the terminal devices through the InfinitySuite SCADA based trunk oil pipeline dispatcher system. It allows the dispatcher to perform on-line process monitoring. Algorithm controller processes acknowledgement upon the instruction execution.

 

In old control systems, it was the dispatcher who launched the pipeline and changed its operating modes by means of dispatcher system mnemonic diagrams. In EleSy's unified control system all possible pipeline operating modes and the mode switching are processed by the control algorithms. To eliminate the risk of emergency, EleEy provided various protection functions and developed the algorithms to ensure the pipeline trouble-free operation.

All pipeline operations are controlled by the same I/O server allowing the dispatcher to monitor the algorithmic processes and process equipment operation simultaneously using the customary dispatcher control system mnemonic diagrams.

Results

In December 2009, the Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean oil pipeline was launched. The Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, attended the event of pumping the first batch of Siberian oil into an oil tanker.