United States pipeline operators are no doubt aware of the regulations that expand the requirements for installing leak detection systems.

Briefly, the US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) rule change covers a lot of areas, including the extension of the required “use of leak detection systems beyond HCAs to all regulated hazardous liquid pipelines, except for offshore gathering and regulated rural gathering pipelines. The use of such systems will help mitigate the effects of hazardous liquid pipeline failures that occur outside of HCAs,” according to the PHSMA website.

Easily eliminate the tedious administrative challenges your business faces in meeting regulatory compliance requirements.

Emerson's DeltaV SaaS SCADA Asset Protect is a web-based Asset Management, Preventative Maintenance (PM), Health, Safety, and Environmental application. Our application acts as a secure single source repository for various documents such as inspection and calibration reports, safety procedures, drawings, invoices, standard operating procedures, and more.

The water management industry continues to be plagued by multiple challenges, including aging infrastructure combined with an aging workforce that puts our water supply systems at even greater risk due to the loss of critical expertise and other hurdles like natural disasters including wildfires, floods, and drought that can significantly impact the safety of our water systems.

Water management operations will need to unleash the value of data by using analytics and other technologies to drive better decision-making, optimize and prioritize system investments, and drive cost efficiencies that create safer operations.

The benefits of making oil and gas production autonomous are many. Production increases based on the ability to detect and remedy problems in seconds rather than hours is topmost, followed by safety, efficiencies when physical repairs are needed and more precision in PM schedules are among the others.

We've made some great progress in the past five years with applications like DeltaV SaaS SCADA with Autonomous Rod Pump. Although, some would point out that the Oil Patch, due to its boom-and-bust nature, lags behind other industries in this area with necessity being the mother of invention.

There is a bit of magic in every childhood story we read. Whether it be the Chronicles of Narnia with its enchanted kingdom or Aladdin’s genie in the lamp, we learn very early that supernatural powers often come in pretty handy.

Maybe you could use some telepathic powers to know what is happening in a remote production location. You’ve probably wished to have psychic abilities to know when a wellsite will stop producing before it happens, or if your team is safe working on site.

Most certainly you’d enjoy the gift of telekinesis to restart an artificial lift.

Do-it-yourself field automation sounds great until you realize all the mind-bending decisions involved. I think of this when I go to a favorite restaurant; a fast-casual place where you line up in front of a massive menu board loaded with salads, sandwiches, soups, potatoes, sides of all sorts, and pretty much any other causal type of food you could possibly want or crave, but I have to say their menu is pretty huge.

It’s obvious whenever the person in front of me is a first-timer. Eyes wide, hands shaking, and lips moving without a sound. I can't help but wonder if they're okay or getting ready to have a meltdown from menu overload. Only because I felt that way on my first couple of visits.

After you absorb all that content it's easy to see the big picture and navigating their giant menu is meant to be more of an opportunity to get pretty much anything you may want, not the overwhelming first-timer experience I often witness.

For years now we’ve been able to monitor tank levels, compressors, pump operations and flow meters. Most of that is pretty cut-and-dried. The tank is at whatever level it’s at; the pump is either running or it’s not. An alarm tells us what we need to know the minute we need to know it.

But detecting a pipeline leak involves combining a number of data points and deciding which ones, or which combination of points, means there really is a leak. I’m stressing “really” because the industry first believed any anomaly needed to be alarmed because at that point an anomaly equaled leak, and we defiantly know the faster that leak could be stopped, and repaired; the more profits from your production ended up staying in your pocket.

Seeing is truly believing. Through Emerson's DeltaV™ SaaS SCADA you can “see” so many issues right from your computer or phone:

Is my unit running? What’s the line pressure? Who's actually on-site? Is the tank filling up?

Techs and pumpers are already logging much less drive time, the equipment is logging lots more “up” time and the accountants are pushing that bottom line lower and lower. And yet—it still would be nice to actually see what’s happening out there.

Remote locations with industrial assets that don't have anyone locally monitoring performance need alarms (for starters). Alarms can be used to monitor data for anything out of the ordinary, catching smaller deviations, and alerting an operator to a possible situation before it escalates. When it comes to effective remote operations management, there are few better tools available than alarming capabilities.