Production, Processing, Transportation and Utilisation of Natural Gas Future Need for Information an

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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

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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
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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
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Application areas
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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

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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

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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

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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

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Enabling Technologies
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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

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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

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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

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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
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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

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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
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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

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Conclusions
Instrumentation, communication, storage
Displays, VR,
Design, operation, modification
Mathematical tools, human decision making
Instrumentation, communication, storage
(documentation). Feedback?
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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 NTNUs
  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