Abstract
Natural gas distribution providers have periodic and reactive maintenance plans that are not providing enough feedback and data to establish proper predictive analysis for failure, especially on distribution gas regulator station that are regulating gas from transmission pressure to a safe customer distribution pressure, these stations are the only overpressure safeguard and the highest risk at the same time. With the recent advances in computer and telecommunications technologies, some major gas utilities initiated more robust predictive risk analysis plans by introducing SCADA supervisory control and data acquisition to gas distribution, mainly monitoring gas regulator stations and their behavior based on their established overpressure prevention philosophies and long-term predictive analysis goals. This study outlines a full SCADA monitoring solution on a dual run gas distribution regulator station equipped with primary overpressure protection and redundancy options. RTU (Remote Terminal Units) containing flow and pressure monitoring transmitters are installed at specific pressure reduction points in the station piping. Unlike common monitoring practice, we are introducing mid-stream pressure monitoring between the monitor and regular valves, filter differential and flow measurement in our proposed SCADA set up. This system provides real time visibility and data to the gas control room to quickly recognize abnormal or emergency events and assess the current health of regulator equipment. The outlined risk mitigations in this study are created based on identified risks of overpressure under several regulation failure modes of the regulators in standby and working modes. Our SCADA solution introduces means to enhance deductive analysis and predictability for gas control departments and monitoring groups leading to a safer and more reliable gas distribution system, improving emergency response and creating more comprehensive maintenance plans driven by long term predictive risk plans.
Highlights
Distribution natural gas systems all over the world are served by multiple gas regulator stations forming hydraulically independent systems with redundancies and possible interconnections with manual and automated overpressure protection within the stations
The main risk facing gas utilities in their distribution systems is overpressure due to gas regulation failure. knowing that the only protection between the very high transmission pressure system is a distribution gas regulator station, all utilities created periodic and reactive maintenance plans that are established based on subject matter experts and facilities components manufacturers recommendations
Our main goal is to significantly reduce overpressure events reducing outages and recognizing abnormal and emergency events to improve field response and targeted and adequate response on pin-pointed issues locations
Summary
Distribution natural gas systems all over the world are served by multiple gas regulator stations forming hydraulically independent systems with redundancies and possible interconnections with manual and automated overpressure protection within the stations. Knowing that the only protection between the very high transmission pressure system is a distribution gas regulator station, all utilities created periodic and reactive maintenance plans that are established based on subject matter experts and facilities components manufacturers recommendations. These plans do not provide a mean to properly create real time system visibility and long-term predictive risk plans as well as establishing robust hydraulic simulation models based on real collected data. Our SCADA solution allows constant assessment of the health of regulator equipment and creation of robust overpressure risk mitigation strategies based on collected pressure data and set alarms
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