Saudi Aramco trusts Trusted

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jun 11, 2002

Four triple modular redundancy (TMR) burner management systems, with a total value of $1.3 million, are being manufactured by ICS Triplex for the Aramco Abqaiq refinery in Saudi Arabia.

Four triple modular redundancy (TMR) burner management systems, with a total value of $1.3 million, are being manufactured by ICS Triplex for the Aramco Abqaiq refinery in Saudi Arabia.

They will form part of a burner management upgrade project, the lead contractor for which is Forney.

The complete system is being built in the ICS Triplex Houston, Texas facility before being shipped out and installed at the Abqaiq plant.

Completion, including testing and certification is expected in November, having started in March of this year.

The burner management project includes upgrading four Mitsubishi boilers from the original NEI hardwired control design, which at 20+ years old was approaching the end of its practical life.

A total of 14 boilers are in service at the Abqaiq plant and these four particular boilers are the largest of the group.

Steam pressure is 600 pounds.

All four boilers are dedicated to steam generation for on site use.

The Aramco Abqaiq refinery is the world's largest oil and gas stabilization plant with a crude processing capacity of 13 million barrels per day.

Typical production is in the range of 5-7 million barrels per day, which represents just over 80% of Saudi Arabia's light to medium arab crude production.

Of this production, 93% is for export, so it is loaded directly into ocean-going tankers, the remainder being used for local consumption.

ICS Triplex's Trusted System was first evaluated on the Abqaiq Plant's Shaybah Crude Stabilization Unit and was successfully accepted as a result of Trusted's performance.

The Shaybah unit processes the highest quality "Arab extra light" crude which is Saudi Arabia's most valuable crude oil.

This project is being run concurrently with another to upgrade the existing distributed control system from Emerson Process Management's Provox to ICS Triplex's Trusted.

Several communication technologies are used to interface between the Provox DCS and Trusted, including Modbus serial drivers, OPC (OLE for process control) using ICS Triplex's T8151 communication module with Provox's intelligent device interface module (IDI).

Before the order could be placed ICS Triplex had to be appointed to Saudi ARAMCO's prestigious Restricted Vendor Listing (RVL).

The evaluation process included a comprehensive two-year assessment of the Trusted hardware and software, inspections of ICS Triplex's manufacturing plants and integration facilities, monitoring of record keeping procedures, including QA and QC, and validation of corporate viability.

Part of the two-year programme involved the development of some special purpose hardware modules for Trusted, and these are now available to all ICS Triplex customers.

Only one other TMR manufacturer is currently listed on the RVL.

Membership of the RVL keeps ICS Triplex engineers busy, quoting for 10-15 systems a year.

The market for TMR safety systems is highly regulated, due to the potentially disastrous results of an equipment failure.

It is worth approaching $500 million a year, and is expanding at 5-10% annually, due to continued exploration and development of new oilfields and also to retrofit and upgrade projects in existing facilities as safety issues become subject to ever-tighter legislation.

TMR systems like the Trusted are used in exploration, extraction, processing and distribution systems throughout the petrochemical sector, where safety is paramount but spurious shutdowns must be avoided due to the massive disruption to production they cause.

In order to prevent unnecessary shutdowns associated with failsafe systems, the Trusted is built from a fault tolerant triple modular redundant RunSafe design.

This provides the user with 1msec sequence of event resolution, which ensures exceptional performance by multiple-level assessment of possible fault signals.

Trusted technology continues to be the technology leader with recent release of version 3.2, a package of new features that further widen its flexibility.