For oil and gas companies operating in the midstream sector, the ability to capture, manage and distribute massive volumes of field data is a must. Processing and transporting energy commodities are volatile businesses, with variables such as weather, geography, supply, demand and regulatory issues to consider. Addressing these variables depends greatly on information generated by field devices, which is why Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) solutions have been around for about as long as there have been pipelines to move gas and oil.

Designed to collect and present field data, SCADA systems have evolved over time from rudimentary tools with limited reach, to technologies with the ability to process hundreds of millions (and soon billions) of field data updates per day. But, as SCADA capabilities have advanced, a key challenge remains: how can companies transform oceans of data into useful intelligence that can be leveraged by an array of operational and business personnel throughout the organization, such as optimization and compressor engineers and the gas-marketing group?

“Today, operations management is comprised of largely disparate systems,” says Chris Smith, president and chief executive of CygNet Software Inc., a 75-employee, privately held company based in San Luis Obispo, California. “The next evolution for SCADA is to become less about SCADA and more about the operations platform, where the functionality of SCADA is expanded to address other application problems. Today, most of our end users have had to build custom solutions or cobble other pieces together.”

"As this generation retires, and it is retiring at a rapid rate, the industry has to be able to replace some of that gray matter with systems that have algorithms that can help it solve those problems." Chris Smith, Cygnet Software.

Extending the value of SCADA requires extending data distribution beyond operations and into the entire enterprise. In this way, stakeholders across the midstream organization —including contributors from accounting, marketing and sales, regulatory compliance and more — can make real-time field data a more vital component of their day-to-day decisions.

Also, for CygNet, the midstream sector is a growing market for company-wide SCADA platforms.

“We’ve had quite an awakening during the past 12 months,” says Smith. “If someone had asked us, just two years ago, which segments of the energy industry we participate in, we would have said we are active in the exploration and production, gas transmission and local distribution markets. We wouldn’t have talked about midstream as a separate segment. Now, we realize there is a need for us to break that out and track it. The midstream sector has different needs than producers and long-haul transmission companies.”

Enterprise approach

When SCADA first came along, simply capturing field data was a critical first step. The problem was that there were limited methods to deliver data to a diverse range of operations and business users. Data was presented through static reports, and as a result, analyzing and actually using the information was hugely time consuming. Even as the technology has evolved, the industry has favored custom-engineered, proprietary solutions that require expensive IT resources to build, integrate and maintain. While providing functional depth, these solutions are too operations-centric, trapping critical field data within numerous “silos” that are cut off from other business systems and applications, and thus from information consumers working outside of the operations department.

Today’s enterprise approach to field data management requires a more open and flexible IT solution – one that can reach beyond the traditional boundaries of SCADA. Increasingly, oil and gas companies are deploying enterprise operations platforms to get the end-to-end view of data that’s imperative for fast and informed decision making. An enterprise-operations platform can take SCADA data to the next level, by collecting real-time data from remote devices no matter where they are located, normalizing this data so that it is of value to users throughout the organization, and finally, distributing it over a scalable network architecture that can evolve along with the business.

“SCADA systems have evolved from being situated in a single control room as an isolated function, disconnected from the rest of the business, to now being used as an integral part of the business,” says Smith. “Transmission companies have to be market responsive, so they have to know what is being asked of them and be able to anticipate shifts in customer-demand patterns. They have to become more nimble to react to market changes.”

Also, midstream operators are being asked to respond to more regulatory oversight. “Certainly, 2010 was the year with a disastrous summer for oil and gas spills,” says Smith. “As a result, we will see some existing regulations obtain accelerated implementations dates, while additional regulations are being crafted for several midstream companies I have talked to during the past three months.

“I’ve learned that they all have projects, in-house now, to upgrade some of their SCADA software so they can better respond to and support the new regulatory requirements that are coming down the pipe.”

Three key criteria are required to make the successful transition from traditional SCADA to a solution that powers decision making across an entire enterprise.

1) Secure and efficient support for any device

Today’s midstream operators need to capture and integrate data from a diverse array of field devices developed by multiple manufacturers, using a variety of communications protocols (everything from LANs, WANs and VPNs, to the Internet, satellite, cable, XML, .NET and more). Additionally, end users may access information through myriad devices and platforms, including desktop computers, notebooks, tablet PCs, smart phones, Web browsers, instant messages, wikis, etc.

Thus, it is critical that an enterprise-operations platform is flexible enough to connect with an evolving array of operational devices and corporate systems. This requires an open architecture that supports all the current major enterprise standards-based interfaces, such as XML, JMS and HTTP.

Essentially, open standards help ensure that data can flow from remote devices all the way through to a diversity of end-user systems without requiring “heavy lifting” from IT in the form of customized point-to-point integration. Companies can also more easily scale an open platform, adding new devices and systems as their needs change without having to engage in time-consuming and expensive IT overhaul.

2) A single version of the truth

In the complex world of midstream operations, it’s not uncommon for individual stakeholders to spend a huge percentage of their time tracking down and capturing important information.

For example, an operations-support specialist may need to learn and manage six or seven separate technology systems in order to get a complete picture of what is happening in the field. What’s needed is a “single version of the truth,” such as a central, complete information ecosystem that is simple to deploy, maintain and upgrade. A company that can more efficiently operate, holistically, adds value to its bottom line.

This is the defining mission of an enterprise-operations platform. Architected for maximum scalability, such a platform should include all the SCADA features that operations is accustomed to using, as well as other capabilities (like gas measurement data collection or GIS asset management) and be able to combine this information with core enterprise systems. The goal is to tear down the silos that trap information within departmental or geographic boundaries in order to present the most complete picture possible of current operational reality.

3) Meaningful data translation

Consider a typical system alert that reads, “register #661, device FR_111 has a value of 152.03.” While this may make sense to the operations team, a marketing executive may find it as indecipherable as ancient Sanskrit.

For an enterprise operations platform to be truly successful, it needs to ensure that the massive amounts of data collected from field devices are easily understood by the many types of users who will be interacting with the information. These include experts like production chemical engineers and compressor-station pump-system operators, as well as nontechnical contributors such as schedulers, finance and accounting teams, marketing and sales and other executive-level decision makers. A certain amount of translation must therefore come into play, so that raw data can be transformed into useful knowledge for all consumers.

Midstream operating companies can transform collected data into useful intelligence that can be leveraged by an array of operational and business personnel throughout the organization.

Changing drivers

As varied as midstream-company operations can be, so are the drivers for SCADA upgrades.

“One of the reasons for change is driven by companies’ adoption and implementation of new regulatory requirements,” explains Smith. “They need to get their technology up to speed so they can be compliant with the new rules. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is driving a significant amount of security and regulatory work in our industry. Also, managers are beginning to realize that they can connect the real-time control systems to the rest of the business to increase market responsiveness.”

But, wait. Just how vulnerable are wide-spread SCADA systems to hackers with mischief on their minds?

“If the companies that installed their SCADA systems haven’t done a good job, then they do have some exposure to risk,” says Smith. “Oil and gas transmission lines stretch across large physical topographies. These are not controlled office environments where IT can run a local area network and isolate it, so no one can get into it. Typically, the data is delivered via many forms of communication, making isolation and protection a significant challenge.

“We are very sensitive to that. We have a team that works on a variety of security and regulatory issues. This includes attending security training and developing best practices to keep our clients better informed about how hackers might try to attack these systems. We then work with our customers to implement different approaches to harden their system. It’s an evergreen problem for the industry, so we are constantly on top of that.”

Another driver for systemwide SCADA capabilities is the search for continuity when experienced personnel begin to retire from the workforce.

“When companies move to a systemwide platform, it helps eliminate the problem of the graying workforce. Today, an experienced controller knows, just by looking at a computer screen, what’s happening to the demand and how to adjust for it. As this generation retires, and it is retiring at a rapid rate, the industry has to be able to replace some of that gray matter with systems that have algorithms that can help it solve those problems.”

As the oil and gas industry continues to be challenged by operational complexity and volatile market conditions, too many companies continue to rely on early-generation SCADA solutions that trap critical information in silos and cut off operations data from the broader enterprise. An enterprise operations platform employs standards-based, network-centric technology to bring SCADA into the next generation. Companies that pursue this approach can dramatically streamline their operations, make valuable information available to users across the entire organization and be in a better position to rapidly adapt in a changing market.

“It’s time to evolve,” says Smith.

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