Honeywell Process Solutions has long served midstream and downstream operations across several industries. Now it’s taking the technologies and solutions it has proven over the years, particularly in refining and petrochemical industries, to help upstream oil and gas markets make sense of the data to improve production performance.
Digital Suites for Oil and Gas combines software with professional services to help oil and gas companies make better decisions for safety, profitability and efficiency during the upstream production process. “That’s where we can make a really big impact in helping our customers operate more safely, get more product out of the ground, have better oil recovery, and make more money,” says Dan O’Brien, global director of production management for Honeywell.
In one example, a customer saw a return on investment (ROI) in less than two months. It was at a remote site with hundreds of very small coal beds or coal seam methane wells. After Honeywell deployed its solution, the software was able to detect a problem within the first two weeks with a progressive cavity pump. “They fixed it without having to shut down the well, and saved several weeks of downtime,” O’Brien explains. “We saved them over $500,000 in the first four weeks.”
Some of the technology for Digital Suites is new, and some has been adapted from other applications, O’Brien notes. It is offered as a fully integrated set of tools, but can also be bought as any combination of the six suites—Operational Data, Process Safety, Production Surveillance, Equipment Effectiveness, Production Excellence, and Operational Performance.
Honeywell contends that production performance can typically improve 3-5 percent, along with safety. “We know from talking to customers and our experience with customers some things they really need,” O’Brien says. “We have to be able to get the technology that’s being developed into the field faster, and get these projects going, not just on paper. We need to increase production by 2, 3, 4, 5 percent. We have to run with very, very solid safety records. They need to increase the amount of product they can get out of the ground economically before they abandon the asset. And they need to be able to run assets for longer. It costs a lot of money to drill another hole in the ground.”
Digital Suites software helps to ensure that essential safety procedures perform as designed, operators are fully trained, alarms are managed and enforced, and production performance is instantly available to detect and mitigate potential events. These software solutions enable collaboration through remote operations, helping to manage the number of local personnel, especially as the upstream industry moves farther offshore into higher-risk conditions.
Digital Suites for Oil and Gas work well with Honeywell’s integrated control and safety systems, instrumentation and industrial products, but can also be integrated into multi-vendor environments. Honeywell is working to identify greenfield opportunities, O’Brien says, but knows the importance of being able to work with competitive systems. “We know everybody has a mix of a lot of vendors,” he says. “So we have to engineer integration capability into all of our software.”
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