Ithaca

The Challenge:

• Maximise the return from a strategic investment in OSIsoft PI
• Provide a specialist resource pool with necessary engineering and strategic skills to meet Ithaca’s real time operational needs
• Deliver measurable business improvements through the provision of appropriate real time data led solutions

Introduction

Ithaca Energy is a North Sea Oil & Gas operator focused on the delivery of growth through the development of UK undeveloped discoveries and the exploitation of its existing UK producing asset portfolio.

Appropriate capture and distribution of real time information is hence critical to the Ithaca operation to facilitate optimal decision making, and help identify possible threats and opportunities as early as possible.

DAI, a Dematic company have worked with Ithaca for nearly 10 years, growing from a niche project through to becoming Ithaca’s real-time applications partner, delivering multiple on-going projects.

Why Dematic?

DAI, a Dematic company has over 30 years of experience providing systems expertise to the Oil & Gas industry addressing areas such as Control and Safety Systems, Real-time Data, Condition Based Monitoring and Production Reporting.

DAI, a Dematic company have over 10 years’ experience of working with OSIsoft’s PI System. We are a certified OSIsoft integration partner. Working out of Aberdeen we have a pool of 14 PI engineers with over 75 years’ experience between them. Within the North Sea we are a market leader independent expert in this area.

Challenges

Ithaca wanted to form a relationship with an applications partner who could not only deliver effective PI led solutions, but could also assist in the initial design phases of their real time projects, and had the necessary infrastructure to provide effective post delivery support.

The two main recurring challenges that frequently arise on individual projects are:

• Understanding future operating requirements with regards to data and systems and delivering these throughout the full project lifecycle from FEED to first oil.
• Utilising the vast amounts of data gathered in offshore operations to allow informed decision making onshore.

Solution

Working hand in hand with Ithaca, we have now delivered many different real-time projects into their systems landscape.

These include:

• Migration of PI environments from acquired assets to Ithaca’s central PI system, to facilitate accurate data retrieval and analysis.
• Extended system use in the areas of production, chemical and environmental reporting to increase the achievable ROI from the initial PI investment and deliver other on-going tangible benefits.
• Introduced new and improved reporting systems for processes such as Tanker Loading and Pipeline Integrity, as well as an ongoing process of health-checking and data cleansing to ensure optimal system usage.
• Addition of new interfaces to third party SCADA/control systems including ABB, Honeywell and Kongsberg and PI-to-PI interfaces to the likes of ConocoPhillips, Schlumberger and TAQA.
• At the FEED stage of multiple projects for major new assets, DAI, a Dematic company acted as the Ithaca in-house experts, analysing asset I/O, capturing requirements from third parties, detailing the on and offshore communications requirements and providing overall design and plans.
• Created an innovative web-enabled mobile data solution for accessing daily, internal and partner reports.

The Result

Through this long term relationship Ithaca have access to skilled and trusted resources that act as a technical authority on behalf of Ithaca as required in major projects and day to day operations.

New projects are planned with confidence and assets are operated effectively based on an accurate and highly available set of real-time data.

A single integrated support agreement for all the Ithaca real-time data applications has been agreed with Dematic, hence offering a single port of call for any related operational issue. Responsibility channels are clear.