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Emerson South Korea general manager, Patrick Deruytter was in Austin recently. You may recall Patrick from earlier posts about large FPSO projects being performed there. He has an upcoming presentation at FLNG Project Advancement on accelerating FLNG (floating liquefied natural gas) project delivery using a main automation contractor approach.

For those unfamiliar with FLNG, it borrows the idea of floating production, storage and offloading by building a liquefied natural gas facility on a tank ship. From Wikipedia:

LNG is principally used for transporting natural gas to markets, where it is regasified and distributed as pipeline natural gas.

According to a World FLNG Market Report:

The IEA [International Energy Agency] forecasts annual growth in natural gas supply will average 1.6% from 2006 to 2030. By 2030, natural gas will account for 23% of total worldwide primary energy supply. The difficulties in progressing onshore projects in LNG has driven the adoption of FLNG which now offers an increasingly important method of bringing gas from stranded reserves to the market.

I saw an advanced copy of Patrick's presentation. In it, he notes that process automation touches every element of an FLNG vessel including production units, hull, ballast, power generation and distribution, fire and safety systems, and information management systems (IMS).

Automation typically accounts for only 3% of the capital costs for an FLNG project, but is critical to its successful operation. The automation technology and project execution methodology play a large role in determining how successful ongoing operations will be.

The Construction Industry Institute (CII) described a PEpC (Procurement, Engineering, procurement and Construction) process that can produce:

...savings in time between 10 and 15 percent and savings in total project labor cost between 4 and 8 percent were possible.

CII describes how the PEpC process does this:

...utilize supplier expertise in all phases of the project life cycle by developing an advance procurement strategy and reaching agreement with suppliers on strategic procurement items and/or systems prior to the associated project engineering activities.

Patrick described how this process works on FLNG processes. Working as a main automation contractor (MAC), his team helps develop the execution plan and schedule, procurement specifications, design and execution specifications, device communication protocols, power/heat/loading estimations, measurement technologies, and role/responsibility matrices--all in the front end engineering design (FEED) phase of the project.

Post-FEED, the team develops cost estimates, clarifies scope of MAC supply for the engineering and procurement construction (EPC) contractors, and develops control system detailed design and integrated tests for long lead-time equipment such as compressors and tank storage.

He describes the role automation technology can play. A distributed modular approach for the automation reduces control room footprint, reduces cable size and weight, and facilitates modular design, pre-assembly and test which helps reduce the project timeline. Wireless instrumentation can reduce the project tasks required by eliminating power and grounding efforts, I/O and cabinet design, installation, and commissioning.

Also, electronic marshalling reduces design, engineering, drawings, cabinets and the associated incremental installation and commissioning effort required.

These technologies combined with a structured project execution methodology help to reduce the overall project risk and cost. It also provides the vessel's staff with the control, safety, and information required for efficient, ongoing operations.

The key in accelerating project execution for FLNG is in deploying recent technologies such as wireless and electronic marshalling combined with an advanced project execution model such as MAC.

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I received an email from one of my friends on the Emerson Process Management Korean team. We featured some of their work with a Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) projects presentation by general manager, Patrick Deruytter, in an earlier post.

The project execution and services team has been quite busy executing mega-sized projects and was recently named a Center of Excellence for Process Automation by the Emerson Asia-Pacific Region staff.

Some of the team's recently completed mega projects include:

• PTT Aromatics and Refining Public Company Limited, the largest aromatics producer in Southeast Asia
• Middle East Oil & Gas facilities modernization project with a South Korean contractor
• Korean Polysilicon solar cell manufacturing process
• Middle East Ethyleneamines production process

The Korean office has 2500 sq. meters (27000 sq. feet) and a team of approximately 200 engineers and PMI-certified project managers working on process automation systems-related projects. They performed a quarter-million project engineering hours over the last year. Given the scope and complexity of most mega-sized projects, the Korean team works with engineers from many world areas executing these projects.

Because of these increasing numbers of projects, a new training center in Seongnam-city provides process automation professionals with certified classes in process control systems, analytical measurement devices, and asset optimization.

I share all this with you, because I have a fondness not only for the increasingly significant projects they do, but also for the innovative spirit that Patrick helps foster. The team established the first non-English Emerson blog of which I'm aware. Check out the Emerson Korea blog. It even contains selected posts from this blog translated into Korean. Here are some pictures on the blog from the award ceremony recognizing their work.

Congratulations to the Korean team and keep leading the way on your projects and innovation efforts!

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I've known Emerson's Patrick Deruytter for many years. He's now the general manager for the Emerson Process Management office in South Korea. As his career has advanced, he's lived in many places--Minnesota and Texas in the U.S., Belgium and the U.K. in Europe, Australia, Singapore, and China. His experiences have included projects, project management, product marketing, lifecycle support, and general management.

He was in Austin last week and we had a chance to catch up. I found out he recently spoke at the Asia Pacific FPSO Summit with a presentation, Enabling Operational Excellence in FPSO. For those not versed in FPSOs, the acronym stands for Floating Production Storage and Offloading. When I worked in the offshore oil and gas industry in the mid-to-late 1980s, the overwhelming majority of offshore production came from fixed-leg platforms that set on the ocean floor.

Patrick highlighted some of the challenges and global trends for FPSOs. The first is the ever-increasing sophistication and complexity of the vessels and the onboard processing facilities. Oil and gas producers are building and modernizing FPSOs to meet the global needs for hydrocarbon-based energy.

Increasingly, FPSO owners want all of their systems integrated--navigation and propulsion systems, integrated automation systems (IAS), custody transfer systems (CTS), etc. Given the fast track nature of FPSO projects, equipment deliveries and skilled project engineers are critical for on time, on-budget performance. Once commissioned, the systems need to be highly reliable and easy to maintain, given the marine environment in which they operate.

Integrated systems provide a single window into the oil & gas production processes, subsea control processes, management of onboard assets, safety instrumented systems, and vessel automation processes (ballast control, offloading, power management, tank washing, etc.)

The design of the processing facilities on FPSOs is becoming extremely modular. This helps with the construction phase while the vessel is in the shipyard, and makes engineering, installation, and commissioning more manageable. The major processes like separation, gas dehydration, gas injection, oil metering, seawater treatment, power generation and distribution, custody transfer, etc. are pre-built, instrumented, and set on the deck of the vessel for integration with the automation and safety systems.

The modular trend extends to the wiring. FPSOs are moving away from large central control rooms toward remote I/O and control stations distributed among the production modules. This reduces the size of the total control room footprint, which is quite expensive on these ships. It also reduces cable runs, which reduces overall weight. And the modular design lends itself to modular pre-assembly and pre-testing which reduces overall commissioning time. Typically, the earlier you find problems, the easier and less expensive they are to resolve.

Patrick listed products across Emerson Process Management and alliance partners used in large marine projects like FPSOs and FLNG (floating liquefied natural gas) vessels. The list included DeltaV automation systems, DeltaV SIS safety systems, AMS suite software, Scanjet tank cleaning, Wärtsilä power distribution / engines / drives / vessel automation / propulsion systems, Rosemount tank radar level gauging and measurement, Fisher valves and regulators, Daniel metering and custody transfer, Micro Motion flow meters, and Valve Automation offshore valve systems.

These technologies have been applied in some of the world's largest FPSOs including ExxonMobil Kizomba A & B, BP Angola, Pemex, and Total, to name a few.

Patrick closed his presentation on WirelessHART wireless devices and how they are being incorporated in applications like wellhead annular pressure and heat exchanger pressure monitoring. This additional monitoring helps more quickly spot abnormal situations and reduces the manual clipboard and keyboard entry work processes.

The level of sophistication and technologies applied to these marine applications has come a long way from my days back in offshore oil production two decades ago!

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