Integration Objects Deploys State-of-the-art Solution for Energy Efficiency at Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq Plants

Client Profile: Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq Plants is the company’s biggest oil processing and crude stabilization facility. It is the main oil processing center for Arabian Extra Light and Arabian Light crude oils, with a capacity of more than 7 million bpd. It has three main processing operations - oil, NGL (natural gas liquids), and utilities. Saudi Aramco’s objective is to maintain its global reputation as a safe, reliable, environment-friendly, and energy efficient operator.

Business Challenges: Abqaiq Plants had a standard KPI management system that monitored energy consumption. This performed basic KPI calculations against fixed targets. When a deviation was detected, the onus of finding the root cause was on the plant personnel, requiring time consuming meetings between numerous experts and divisions to diagnose the issue. Intensive analysis and interpretation of behavior patterns and dynamic process trends were required.

Abqaiq Plants faced the following challenges:

• The need for increased accuracy and performance insight for informed decisions
• False warnings about energy overconsumption, due to using fixed targets instead of dynamic ones
• The cycle time to identify the real root cause was too long while the performance gap persisted
• Inaccurate KPI calculations due to some instrument failures

To overcome these challenges it was imperative to use cutting edge technology because even a very short period of operational downtime can result in the loss of millions of dollars. Hence they chose Integration Objects, with whom they had partnered with on earlier successful projects, to deploy state-of-the-art solutions that:

• Monitor the entire plant energy consumption from a site-wide perspective, down to the equipment level
• Automatically detect the plant state and operating modes, and adjust energy consumption targets accordingly and in real time
• Identify energy performance gaps early
• Isolate the root causes behind performance gaps using automatic root cause analysis and identification
• Take corrective actions while enforcing best practices

Solution Deployed: To overcome these challenges and eliminate performance gaps in energy consumption, Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq Plants selected Integration Objects’ KnowledgeNet platform.  On this platform, energy consumption is calculated and monitored for 24 production units, 57 non-production units, and 237 pieces of critical equipment - representing the main energy guzzlers.

How it Works: The system collects plant data from an OSIsoft PI historian and then uses computing, rules, fault propagation and workflow engines to analyze the data to identify the cause of the performance gaps, while empowering end users with recommended corrective actions. The system keeps a history of all computed KPIs, root cause identification and recommended corrective actions in a database. The results are then published in web dashboards for user access.

The KNet Application: KNet Analytics helped to extract the knowledge from three years of historical data. The use of KNet allows the end user to build a custom root cause analysis algorithm suited to the nature of the process and operating modes. This is a powerful and flexible feature as compared to a fixed off-the-shelf application. Salient features:

• Dynamic targets for reliable and accurate energy consumption warnings
• Automated root cause analysis for immediate resolution
• Data validation to eliminate erroneous instrument readings
• Innovative approach to detect and warn about impending problems
• Online visualization for operations performance insights

Successful End Result: The implementation of the Abqaiq Intelligent Energy KPIs system has significantly reduced energy consumption. Energy savings were estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Other quantifiable benefits:

• Operators, engineers, and managers all found it easy to use the web-based interface to improve plant performance by better managing critical assets and their KPI impacts
• The cycle time and effort to detect and diagnose energy consumption performance gaps was significantly reduced
• Operations knowledge was better retained and deployed online

Keywords: Integration Objects, Saudi Aramco, Abqaiq Plants, KnowledgeNet, Energy Efficiency, ARC Advisory Group.