Inductive Automation Blog

Edge-To-Cloud Architecture Acquires Real-Time Data From Remote Oil & Gas Facilities

Automation Solutions Ecuador (ASE) developed a cloud-based solution for Smart Energy Applications that enables real-time monitoring, data acquisition, and reporting for Gas-to-Grid (G2G) systems located in remote oil & gas facilities in the Amazon. Smart Energy provides Gas to Grid in a Box (G2G_B) solutions to produce energy using the gas associated with the crude oil extraction process. The G2G_B system uses gas without treatment to reduce carbon footprint. It comprises a generation unit (Waukesha), a control and synchronism unit (Woodward Easygen), and a load shedding unit (Multilin). The project developed by ASE was crucial for Smart Energy to get real-time and historical data of electrical and mechanical parameters, KPIs, and automatic reporting of technical, financial, and environmental results. This allowed Smart Energy headquarters to assess the impact of its solutions. Additionally, the project allowed the solution to be maintained with OpEx instead of CapEx.

Standardized Interface & Hardware Allow Oil & Gas Company To Rapidly Onboard New Facilities

Edge Controls combined the flexibility of Opto 22 edge devices to standardize field equipment configuration and commissioning with Ignition 8.1, Chariot MQTT Broker, and Perspective, utilizing these standards to rapidly onboard new facilities and provide users with new workflows with a fully mobile-responsive card-based user interface, all while lowering overall costs.

Reliable Data Supports Cleaner Energy Initiative For 50 Sites

One of South Jersey Industries’ (SJI) key initiatives is to deliver on its commitment to provide cleaner energy. The generation of renewable natural gas facilities at dairy farms is a key production commitment for SJI. A modular production facility is required at each farm site, near the raw materials. The speed of deployment and number of sites involved demands the establishment of a universal architecture and platform for the integration of control and enterprise systems at the company. In addition, the distributed nature of the system and criticality to the energy infrastructure demand the highest level of security and reliability. Finally, SJI requires that all these sites be centrally monitored from an enterprise SCADA system that will also historize data for financial and regulatory reporting. The central importance of reliable data for continual operational financial justification proves the common Digital Transformation adage that “data is the new gas.” SJI Industries tasked InflexionPoint to build a foundation for the application of key control and information technologies and systems that will allow the organization to realize world-class Digital Transformation and create a secure data pipeline. In doing so, SJI would be able to provide users at all levels of the organization with access to control system information. Through the strategic application of industrial information technologies, significant benefits are realized in the following areas: reliability, availability, visibility, and security. InflexionPoint successfully built and deployed this operational technology stack on Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform, which let ACC establish a scalable architecture to support plants/sites of varying sizes and complexity. The integration of data from the site’s control level, through various secure (DMZ) network layers to the corporate core network and cloud providers, has been addressed.

Numerous Custom Applications from One Platform for Provider of Gases, Materials, and Equipment

The customer suffered from a classic corporate administrative problem: too many of its critical processes were managed by a hodgepodge of spreadsheets and paper records. Off-the-shelf products solved some of these needs but were too inflexible to be adapted to the custom internal procedures. Ignition allowed custom applications to be built to satisfy these needs and gain wide community acceptance and shape corporate policy and culture.