Rockwell Automation Fine Tunes Its Strategy for the Oil & Gas Business

Summary

ARC Advisory Group analysts sat down with representatives from Rockwell Automation at the recently acquired vMonitor headquarters in Houston a few weeks ago to discuss the company's path forward in the rapidly growing upstream and midstream oil & gas business. vMonitor, acquired by Rockwell Automation this year, is a wireless and SCADA supplier to the oil & gas business. Its headquarters just happen to be sandwiched between the Endress+Hauser office (a long-time Rockwell Automation alliance partner) and the Rockwell Automation Oil & Gas Business in Houston. With the recent acquisition of vMonitor and a series of new initiatives in oil & gas, Rockwell Automation is making a serious play to increase its market share for process automation solutions in this industry. This initiative also includes construction of a new oil & gas center located on North Sam Houston Parkway in Houston.

The volatility of the upstream oil & gas industry, combined with the wide range of application areas, creates some unique challenges. These require flexibility and the ability to apply technologies to a wide range of applications while addressing specific application requirements, but Rockwell Automation is no newcomer to the industry. The company identified upstream and midstream oil & gas a major target area when it introduced its PlantPAx process automation system several years ago. The addition of safety solutions, an expanding services business, and the ability to integrate process automation solutions with its offerings in drives and motor controls are key advantages. The company has also had a longstanding relationship with instrumentation supplier Endress+Hauser that provides a strong foundation for managing diagnostic data from intelligent devices.

MAC Projects and Long-Term Partnerships Help Address End User Needs

Rockwell Automation has been expanding its main automation contractor (MAC) and project service capabilities in the process industries for several years. The company is placing even more focus on MAC capabilities in oil & gas by coordinating its main electrical contractor (MEC) capabilities with its MAC capabilities on the process automation side to create an integrated approach for both control and electrical products. The company is one of the leading suppliers of drives and motor control centers and has the capability to provide close integration of these assets with the PlantPAx process automation system. OEMs and skid-mounted equipment suppliers are becoming a more crucial part of automation projects and Rockwell Automation has been working hard to form closer relationships with key OEMs in the oil & gas industry. The company has already served as MAC in many projects around the world, including oil & gas end users in China such as CNOOC and CNPC.

vMonitor Adds Wireless and Wellhead Monitoring Expertise

In 2013, Rockwell Automation announced the acquisition of vMonitor, a wireless products and service company focused on digital oilfield automation. vMonitor offers solutions targeted at wellhead monitoring, pipeline monitoring, remote tank monitoring, ESP well monitoring and analysis, and gas lift monitoring and optimization. The company is heavily focused on oil & gas, but also serves other industries such as water & wastewater. With headquarters in Abu Dhabi, vMonitor's customer list includes many of the leaders in oilfield operations.

From a wireless product perspective, the company offers an array of wireless sensor/transmitter types, including pressure, temperature, level, and multivariable. Other wireless products include I/O, gateways, RTUs, radios, and modems. Most of the wireless products operate at either 900 MHz or 2.4 GHz and are rated for operation in Class 1 Division 1 environments. The company offers a variety of configuration, historian, and analysis software packages for use with the wireless instrumentation, as well as field services ranging from site surveys to web hosting.

A New Generation of Prepackaged Solutions

The upstream and midstream oil & gas industry is demanding more prepackaged solutions. The need to drive down project costs and reduce time to project completion so oil can flow is of the upmost importance. Prepackaged, preconfigured solutions require very little of the custom integration and configuration that costs the industry so much money today, and these solutions can be easily replicated and reused at multiple sites around the world. Having a prepackaged solution with full DCS-style configurability is also a big advantage over the current crop of solutions that only offer basic programmability.

These prepackaged solutions can include gas lift, rotating machinery, pumps, turbomachinery control, safety systems packaged for use in subsea applications, and more. Preconfigured solution toolkits (tested under the ISO 13628 standard for subsea oil & gas production systems) include libraries of reference designs. These allow users to build standardized systems that can be customized for their specific requirements using a standardized toolkit. Rockwell Automation now has around 3,000 engineers in the global solutions team that can assist with these projects.

One of the most recent of these prepackaged solutions is the AADvance process safety system. The company is packaging this technology in small, environmentally hardened configurations for deployment in subsea and other demanding applications. AADvance can provide fail-safe, dual- or triple-redundancy on a per-loop basis. The system is being used on applications such as blowout preventers for which SIL 2 capability is the norm. AADvance is also being packaged as configurable small SIS using cause and effect programming with universal I/O interfaces in 50 and 100 point packaged solutions. Full commercial availability of the solution is expected by the end of the year.

Subsea Initiatives

As with the AADvance solution, many of the prepackaged offerings are specifically targeted at subsea applications where we're seeing huge growth in projects, but for which the application of advanced automation solutions currently lags behind the downstream sector. Owner-operators are also determined to drive much of the subsea production assets to the sea floor, reducing the amount of "real estate" needed on offshore platforms or eliminating them entirely. For example, Rockwell Automation is working closely with a large global subsea OEM on a next-generation subsea control module. The company is also working on a subsea pump condition monitoring solution that takes data from intelligent sensors mounted on the pump and delivers diagnostic data to topsides to allow owner-operators to implement a more predictive maintenance strategy.

Rockwell Automation is also testing its subsea solutions to conform to the ISO 13628 standard for subsea production systems. Under its new "Connected Enterprise" initiative, the company uses this digital diagnostic data to provide cloud-enabled remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, and analytics capabilities from the wellhead to the consumer. This resonates well with ARC's own Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) model.

Endress+Hauser Partnership Expands Oil & Gas Sector Possibilities

Field instrumentation is an important part of any oil & gas automation strategy. Digital field devices are the first point of connection for the Industrial Internet of Things in the oil & gas industry. The preferred integration and testing offered by Rockwell Automation and Endress+Hauser provides smooth integration between devices, control systems, and plant asset management applications. While this remains the foundation of the relationship between the two companies, this alliance is also being expanded somewhat to provide integrated field device and automation solutions for industries like natural gas, shale oil, terminal automation, tank farms, process safety, and digital monitoring for intelligent oilfields. Rockwell Automation claims a time savings of almost 70 percent for installing and commissioning Endress+Hauser devices with Rockwell Automation process control systems.

The company has also expanded its approach to asset management with its FactoryTalk AssetCentre offering, which now includes capabilities for intelligent field devices, change management, and disaster recovery functions. AssetCentre relies heavily on FDT/DTM technology to consolidate diagnostic information from devices on multiple networks, including Ethernet IP, FOUNDATION fieldbus, and HART protocols. AssetCentre also incorporates diagnostic information from power products such as drives and motor control centers.

Rockwell Automation's Complementary Partnership with Endress+Hauser Brings Value for Owner-Operators

Rockwell Automation is investing a lot in Ethernet IP. Several Endress+Hauser devices can already connect directly to Ethernet IP, including Coriolis meters, analytical devices, and magnetic flowmeters. With Ethernet IP-based profiles, all devices have a consistent look and feel within Rockwell Automation process systems.

Applying Pavilion Software to Oil & Gas Industry Requirements

To date, optimization software has not been heavily applied in the upstream oil & gas industry. However, according to Rockwell Automation, its new PlantPAx MPC software now offers greater simplicity and tighter integration with the PlantPAx process automation, which the company believes will bring model predictive control to a broader audience in the oil & gas and utilities industries. The company is embedding model predictive control into the PlantPAx system and Control Logix platform. The product is also being evaluated for specific upstream applications such drilling applications that require very fast response times. PlantPAx MPC also offers tunable parameters for nonlinear control to make it more maintainable and sustainable.

Through its partnership with Landmark, a brand of the Halliburton Digital Consulting Solutions Division, Pavilion is providing important technology to advance the digital oilfield of the future and increase the productivity of a reservoir throughout its entire lifecycle. Landmark is embedding Pavilion's modeling, control, and optimization technology engine into its DecisionSpace Production solution to develop and deploy a real-time integrated optimization model that incorporates the reservoir, wells, gathering network, and production facilities. According to company sources, this integrated production operations solution facilitates collaboration by providing holistic asset information, a decision support system, and automated workflow to help companies optimize production. From Logix-embedded MPC through much larger reservoir optimization scalable RA advanced control and optimization products are being used in this space.

Conclusion

While certainly not a newcomer to the upstream oil & gas space, Rockwell Automation appears to be laser-focused on leveraging its broad technology portfolio to provide solutions that can help its upstream customers meet the significant challenges they face in their oil & gas production operations, both onshore and offshore.

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Keywords: Rockwell Automation, PlantPAx, AADvance, vMonitor, Process Automation System, Process Safety System, Oil & Gas.