Abstract

Increasing operating costs and decreasing net revenues have greatly underlined the importance of optimizing production operations. The development of automation systems in the Petroleum Industry has become important in uniting isolated production facilities to form integrated systems.

This paper briefly traces the history and development of remote and computer control systems for gas and oil production. It also describes the development of the remote control and monitoring system installation at Union Oil onshore and offshore production facilities in East Kalimantan. Emphasis is placed more on the description of the remote process system monitoring and control in the Attaka field. The wireless communication and process control system are being used to transmit alarm and flow metering, emergency shutdown, and paging functions between five satellite wellhead platforms and production platform central monitoring system at the Attaka field. Each producing facility is designed to be compatible with remote supervisory control. To obtain this compatibility and a high degree of safety, conditions in each portion of the process system are monitored.

Paralleling the development of automatic control techniques were computer applications. A simple computer system are being used to control and monitor three gas dehydration towers which comprise a portion of the Union LEX Plant operation at Santan onshore facility.

Expectations and development of future systems and evaluation of past experience are discussed in the conclusion.