EFAB Industrial Solutions have recently completed the design, procurement, installation & commissioning of a new Flow Metering Supervisory System and associated network interfaces for Interconnector Limited (INT) at its Bacton Terminal.
INT owns and operates the physically bidirectional gas pipeline that connects the United Kingdom and Belgium. The INT operation is spread across three locations: commercially in London, and physically from gas terminals in Bacton, UK, and Zeebrugge, Belgium. The company is a subsidiary of the Fluxys Group, in which SNAM has a minority stake.
A high-pressure subsea gas interconnector pipeline connects the gas compression terminals. The pipeline is a critical link in the European gas supply chain, serving as a strategic energy link between the United Kingdom and continental Europe. The Interconnector pipeline is highly adaptable and can change direction in a matter of hours, allowing shippers to react quickly to changing demand and market signals.
The new Flow Metering Supervisory System includes a new three-bay panel suite with a six-stream shipped gas bay with individual S600+ flow computers, a four-stream fuel gas bay with pay/check S600+ flow computers, and a network bay with TruST Metering Supervisory Computers, HMI, and network equipment.
To allow measurement optimisation the new system incorporates Swinton’s Live Uncertainty application, which gives operations the opportunity to ensure each Shipped Gas meter stream is operating at the lowest possible measurement uncertainty for the nominated flows by selecting streams to operate within their optimum design parameters.
Also incorporated within the System is a Condition Based Monitoring (CBM) package for the Gas Chromatographs which detects drift on daily calibrations, warning of any impending failures and reducing the need for scheduled interventions.
To further reduce maintenance effort Kelton’s KMM package has been installed on the HMI with a direct OPC interface to the live measurement data, this allows automated data capture for both calculation checks and transmitter calibrations.
As well as maintaining existing interfaces to SCADA, compressor control systems and allocation systems, an EEMUA191 alarm management and data review were carried out, reducing the previous data hand-off to Operations, from around 2,000 tags to approximately 450, minimising nuisance alarms, and only alerting upon the immediate requirement for Operator intervention.
The installation is designed to achieve a more robust Metering Supervisory System, with reduced complexity and full redundancy to ensure maximum availability, whilst removing obsolescence issues with the previously installed equipment.
The system has also been designed to reduce wherever possible, manual intervention and routine maintenance, by incorporating automated error detection and online data capture.
This is the second phase of upgrading the flow measurement & gas quality system, with the installation of a new gas analysis & sampling system being completed earlier this year by EFAB, and now brought into service during this shutdown by incorporating the analysis data into the new Metering Supervisory System
With thanks as always to the superb support from our specialist supply chain:
