Online control room upgrade makes DeltaV workstations the primary Human Machine Interface (HMI) for existing Bailey controllers and devices

Emerson Process Management's migration engineering services and DeltaV Connect technology have enabled Groupement Berkine to upgrade their aging control room at their Hassi Berkine South oil field site located in the Berkine Basin, in southeast Algeria, without any downtime or lost production. It has been estimated that this saved the company $25 million over a conventional solution.

Groupement Berkine, a joint operating venture between Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and Sonatrach, the Algerian National Oil Company, was formed to co-develop and produce a number of oil fields in the deserts of Algeria. From its Hassi Berkine site, Groupement Berkine produces 250,000 barrels of oil per day, equating to almost one quarter of Algeria's daily oil production.

The existing Bailey HMI system at Hassi Berkine was aging and the ongoing maintenance costs - due to the limited availability of parts and dedicated maintenance resource - were projected to be unacceptably high. The consoles are critical to the smooth running of the plant and any failure could have caused an unscheduled shutdown resulting in a loss of production.

The main challenge for Groupement Berkine was to replace the existing HMI system without requiring any downtime, which would cost the plant around US$25 million per day in lost production. It was also essential that the upgrade would not have a detrimental effect on the DCS running the plant. The existing legacy Bailey consoles and over 800 extensive graphic displays were migrated to DeltaV workstations over a nine-month period

Emerson's DeltaV Connect Solution for Bailey Systems was used to seamlessly connect new DeltaV operator stations with existing Bailey controllers and I/O. The DeltaV Connect Solution is an interface designed to communicate with tags in the Bailey Process Control Units so that operators perform the same tasks from DeltaV Operate workstations as they did from the Bailey consoles. The system installs and starts up with no downtime, enables redundancy, and requires no modifications to the Bailey DCS.

The existing Bailey INFI 90 DCS contained over 16,000 tags that all needed to be migrated and commissioned while the plant remained online. Over 800 graphic displays had to be designed to closely match the existing screens in order to minimize any operator training difficulties during the switchover.

Combining the expertise of Emerson's engineering staff with the use of an automated conversion utility, it was possible to generate DeltaV operator interface displays with the same primary objects, layout, and toolbars for one-click navigation to other displays.