Production, Processing, Transportation and Utilisation of Natural Gas - Future Need for Information and Communication T

1. Production, Processing, Transportation and Utilisation of Natural Gas -Future Need for Information and Communication Technology Morten Hovd Engineering Cybernetics Department www.itk.ntnu.no Gas Technology Center NTNU - SINTEF www.ntnu.no/gass

2. Scope • Production, processing, transportation, utilisation of natural gas. • No attempt to cover petroleum prospecting or drilling • Utilisation of NG similar to other chemical and energy production processes • some of the needs for ICT will be similar • Abundant resources of natural gas • will surpass oil production within a decade • Mostly exported • low degree of processing limits added value • Political / environmental issues Background

3. Many challenges • Improved understanding of basic phenomena • New products and new/improved production processes • Improved operation and control • Improved basis for investment decisions • … • Research, engineering, operations, … • Off-line • On-line • real time • feedback Application scenaria for ICT

4. Application areas

5. Process design - present: • Specified production capacity of specified product • Design focus: • economy, flexibility, operability • environment, health & safety • A few readily accessible tools • ”pinch curve” in heat integration • process flowsheeting and simulation programs • More general approaches lead to very complex problems • MINLP optimisation problems

6. Process and product design - future(?) • Specifications on • end-use properties of product (strength, abrasion resistance, electrical conductivity,…) • properties related to subsequent processing • properties related to recycling/disposal • Severely complicates an already difficult problem • Connections between microscopic phenomena and macroscopic properties • two-way communication between different model scales

7. Process operations • Wide range of time scales • from fractions of a second to months • Short time scales: • from fractions of a second to (a few) minutes • safety and control systems • Long time scales: • from days to months • production planning, supply chain management • Intermediate time scales • from minutes to days • interface between ’business’ and ’plant operations’ • complex problems, but significant time for calculations

8. Operator support • Supporting decision making by human operators • ’what if’-analysis using simulation • advance warning of developing problems • documentation and operational procedures available on demand • navigating historical data (what happened last time?) • data analysis to identify poorly functioning equipment or control systems

9. Enabling Technologies

10. Instrumentation • Measurements and actuators • Critical elements in system monitoring and control • Many challenging applications • downhole, subsea, chemical processes • Reliability • maintenance is extremely costly or even impossible • Communication and energy supply

11. Communication • Another critical technology area with many challenging applications • Number of signals and cables • practical and safety issues in wireless communication • Challenging locations and environment • downhole • subsea • inside transmission pipelines

12. Modelling • Models needed in all types of advanced plant design, optimisation, monitoring and control • Developing, verifying and maintaining models a major cost in many applications • tools available for linear systems • Need effective tools for • developing rigorous models • parameter fitting and model verification for non-linear models • model reduction for complex models • both ODE- and PDE-based models

13. Simulation • Large scale problems • Exploitation of system structure • Massive amounts of data • large-scale simulations • on-line data from production plants • Effective visualisation required to interpret and draw conclusions from the data Visualisation

14. Optimisation • Many application areas • investment decisions, supply chain management, production planning, monitoring and control • Problems and requirements vary with application • computational time and complexity (on-line and off-line) • reliability • ability to analyse the effects of uncertainty

15. Control • Makes active use of instrumentation, communication, modelling, simulation and optimisation • But more than an aggregate of other technologies: Feedback can fundamentally change the behaviour of a system • slugging flow in pipelines • unstable gas-lifted wells • compressor surge • Many research issues • control structure design • stability of constrained, non-linear, and/or hybrid control systems • robustness to model uncertainty • reducing on-line computational requirements • … Stabilised using feedback control

16. MEMS technology • Potentially very interesting, but not much explored in the context of gas technology • Aerospace: ’active skins’ for minimising drag on surfaces • impeller blades in compressors? • transmission pipelines? • Many applications where distributed sensing would be useful • reliability, harsh environments • communication and operating energy

17. Gather and organise information Present, interpret Analyse,Decide Task Implement decision Conclusions Instrumentation, communication, storage Displays, VR,… Design, operation, modification Mathematical tools, human decision making Instrumentation, communication, storage (documentation). Feedback?

18. Conclusions • Many application areas for ICT within gas tecnology • Many engineering disciplines involved in gas technology • with different needs for ICT • In many cases, domain-specific knowledge is crucial for the successful application of ICT • some knowledge of ICT is essential for recognising potential applications • The need for ICT is recognised by NTNU’s ’traditional engineering’ departments • but ICT is not an end in itself, but means to solve engineering problems • does not reduce the need for understanding the engineering problem