Real-Time Data Across the Entire Enterprise for a Leading Oil & Gas Company in Latin America

Project Scope

• Tags: 10,000 for Ecuador, 870 for Argentina 
• Screens: 14 for Ecuador, one for global
• Clients: 25 for Ecuador, 10 for global
• Devices used: Mostly PLCs for Ecuador, OPC DA for Argentina
• Architectures used: 2 pairs of Redundant Gateways with 3 Standard Satellite Gateways for Ecuador; Hub & Spoke for global
• Databases used: three MySQL Servers for Ecuador, one MSSQL Server for global
• Historical data logged: 10,000 for Ecuador, 870 for Argentina

Project Overview

Pluspetrol, one of the leading oil & gas companies in Latin America, acquired Block 10 operations in Ecuador and successfully finished migrating one of the largest SCADA systems in Ecuador to Ignition in 2019. The fact that all Ecuador operations chose Ignition as their monitoring, control, and information platform allowed the corporation to evaluate its benefits and choose it as the appropriate tool for digital transformation of the company at the corporate level.

In 2020, Pluspetrol adopted Ignition software to concentrate the information of the processes of its different assets in many countries to allow availability of information at the corporate level. With Ignition as the foundation, the corporation can now collect and distribute information in an efficient, real-time, and effortless way for different area users and third-party applications and corporate services.

In the search for improvement in decision-making tools for corporate management tasks, Pluspetrol created a standard called IDEA (known as Scalable and Open Data Infrastructure in Spanish) to allow the data to be available along the different corporate levels, transform it into information easily consumed by whoever needs it along its infrastructure, and, of course, deliver and exchange it with other digital transformation initiative tools, ERP systems, and other third-party platforms. Pluspetrol was looking for the appropriate tool that would allow it to carry out the data acquisition from different operating plants in different countries in an optimum and cost-efficient way.

Having operations in six countries — each with different software vendors for their SCADA operations — was a challenge in the effort to build a solid corporate SCADA and data collection infrastructure that allows the corporation to develop all its digital transformation initiatives being developed by staff.

In the meantime, Ecuador operations faced new challenges like the need to use information for analysis and the improvement of production through evaluation and decision-making for different areas such as production, reservoir, maintenance, pipelines, and more.

In 2020, Pluspetrol acquired its Ecuador operations (Block 10 in the Ecuadorian jungle) that had its SCADA system based on Ignition. This platform was not the standard used in the rest of the operations sites located in Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Angola, and Suriname. Nevertheless, Ignition’s versatile architectures and connection features based on the most common protocols in the industry allows the corporate platform to link to every local SCADA platform and deliver its data for central collection, no matter what control and monitoring platform each country has invested in previously for their operations. As a result, Ignition was chosen as the appropriate tool to become the IDEA standard for operations.

IDEA deployment began with a pilot project located in Neuquén, Argentina, with an OT Ignition Gateway that acquires the information through OPC-COM from the local third-party SCADA running on the local asset’s operational network. This allows all data to be transferred through a second DMZ Ignition Gateway in a safe and optimized way. Gateway network connections allow data to flow toward the corporate data center. This information is stored and centralized through a corporate Gateway infrastructure located at the IT corporate network operation center. Using this corporate Gateway also allows data to be available to clients at different levels, from local operators to international managers all along the corporation.

At the same time, this information will be available for third-party systems through DB interfaces or Sepasoft Web Services, so different digital transformation initiatives or government-requested data can be delivered in a standard way through services available for everyone at the corporation via API.

In the Ecuadorian operations, a new application called Process Indicators has been developed for purely information analysis areas, which has made it possible to improve decision-making. This application includes information on equipment performance, energy consumption, and crude log, and audit reports in order to know the activity that stops the production more often and to improve the performance of each process. In the future, features will be added to allow evaluating the performance of the plant and minimizing manual data collection. All this prepares the Ecuadorian ops to be ready to join the IDEA standard.

To evaluate equipment performance, the maintenance team uses the on and off log stored in the database of the main stations to record causes when an equipment shutdown is detected. Additionally, these logs help verify the performance of the equipment and the most common causes for fault. This has made it possible to improve the performance of the process and reduce production stops.

Energy consumption of the equipment is stored by using flow meters and load measuring instruments. This information makes it possible to evaluate the energy consumption of the plant and analyze new solutions to lower consumption. This also applies to the crude oil log.

The application keeps growing and being developed, merging process applications with management and production.

Pluspetrol has allowed corporate-level access to data in real time from any of the operation centers and offices. Now sites in Peru are in the process of joining the IDEA initiative. Soon, more sites located in Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador, which already has Ignition, will be incorporated into the corporate SCADA system.

The collected and centralized data will be available to third-party systems such as ERPs, through Web Services and other available technologies.

In Ecuador, the system has allowed constant development for all areas in the plant with a faster response and taking the operation to an administrative/management level.

New opportunities have arisen for the customer’s everyday operations due to the IDEA standard. Every area in the company can access data in real time. This is the basic difference for everything. Making decisions based on past data only is now history. Having real-time information from past and current data enables the customer’s operations to be more efficient — and helps tremendously with constant improvements to operations.