Natural Gas Production: Enabling In-the-Field Meter Data

The problem for Dart Oil and Gas was that production data from its methane gas wells was not available to engineers in the field. Switching from a centralized system using OPC technology and DDE to a modern HMI/SCADA system turned iPhones into HMIs, enabling mobile, real-time, in-the-field meter data.

Dart Oil and Gas operates a field of coal bed methane gas wells in the Cherokee Basin, located about 890 miles from Tulsa, Okla. Wells fitted with electronic flow meters passed data through an Ethernet network (TCP/IP backbone) paired with an RS232 radio network back to a central gateway. All field data was consolidated at the main office and not available to engineers in the field.

Senior Measurement Technician Dennis Brown began solving the problem with a wireless network and an OPC server calledTDS32. The TDS32 OPC/DDE driver is a Totalflow protocol link to all OPC/Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) software systems. It supports more than 50,000 tags, and is compatible with WinCCU software. It also can serve as a stand-alone link to other systems.

This solution increased the amount of data flowing from the wells, but did not address the problem of multi-operator data access in the field. All data was still only available through corporate’s DDE system. Not only did operators need a physical trip back to the office to see production data, production values needed to be refreshed at the beginning of each shift due to the inability of the DDE connection to establish a polling routine.

The company made the decision to change the system, making the data available in real-time through the use of an HMI or OPC client. The goal was a flexible system that would meet current needs, and be scalable with additional modules in the future.

Dart Oil and Gas chose a solution from Open Automation Software (www.opcsystems.net), the Evergreen, Colo. maker of the OPC Systems.Net suite of Microsoft .Net products for SCADA, HMI and plant floor reporting. The company delivered a plug and play solution containing OPC Systems Trend, OPW Web Controls, OPC Database and OPS Excel modules.

Using this combination of software products, the existing DDE connection could connect directly to the Open Excel interface, enabling the use of Microsoft Windows 7 instead of DDE. This eliminated the need to refresh DDE values for each shift (because of OPC's built-in polling), and allowed field engineers to use Windows 7 to access data at any time via the Web.
Now data could be securely streamed directly to any Web-enabled smartphone or other device. And data also can be pushed from the iPhone through the OPC server to the test meters in the field.

Dart Oil and Gas engineers can “hit a button on the phone and receive data from the poll request [and] troubleshoot problems in a matter of minutes, all over their smartphone,” according to Brown. “Individuals that do meter work for a living have been praising OPC's ability to pass data flawlessly for years. The ability to use Open Automation Software to integrate smartphones as new HMIs only enhances that ability.”

与其担心自己创建scripts to access the data, Dart Oil and Gas engineers can get right to work, adds Brown. Operators now can see real-time values as well as weekly trends for any pump. Maintenance schedules can be coordinated with production requirements, and predictive maintenance has improved because true real-time data is now available.

Jim Chrzan,jchrzan@automationworld.com, is publisher of Automation World.