Rivers fields processing facilities.

Emerson Process Management has been selected by Costain Oil, Gas and Process as a major instrumentation and controls supplier for the Rivers fields onshore processing facilities at Barrow in Cumbria.

Emerson will supply automation engineering, project management, and PlantWeb digital plant architecture with Foundation fieldbus technology for automation of new sour gas treatment facilities.

Three of the five Rivers sour gas fields in the east Irish Sea are being developed by Burlington Resources (Irish Sea) in a $260 million project.

The Rivers onshore facilities will be automated by Emerson to receive wet sour gas from the offshore platform in the Calder gas field, which will collect the gas from three Rivers fields (Calder, Crossans and Darwen).

The plant will separate the liquids, compress the gas to export pressure, sweeten the gas by removing some of the H2S (hydrogen sulphide), and forward the gas to an existing gas terminal for processing.

In setting requirements for the new plant, Costain placed particular importance on the optimisation of capital and engineering costs, cabling and commissioning time and costs, and total cost of ownership.

The Emerson solution includes PlantWeb architecture that reduces front end time and cost through its DeltaV digital automation system and AMS predictive maintenance software.

These will communicate using Foundation fieldbus technology over the PlantWeb open, standard, all-digital communications network.

The network approach delivers best installation cost, and delivers diagnostic data from plant instrumentation and control devices to help diagnose problems that might result in downtime later on.

The DeltaV digital automation system will include a 1500 channel input/output subsystem, with fully redundant controllers, Foundation fieldbus H1 cards, analogue and serial interface cards.

Emerson intelligent field devices will include 400 Foundation fieldbus capable instruments, including Rosemount pressure and temperature transmitters, and digital valve controllers.

Emerson RS3 control systems are used on other existing Irish Sea production platforms, and in other onshore processing facilities: integration with these systems was another important requirement for the new processing plant.

PlantWeb architecture achieves this by using the capability of the DeltaV automation system to implement Simplex OPC interfaces to the Emerson RS3 control systems, and also by accepting serial interfaces from gas compression control systems.

Through this integration, the DeltaV system will provide the Rivers fields operators with a single window to both onshore and offshore operations.

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