Bedrock Automation announced that Pinnacle Midstream, a Houston-based supplier of storage and processing services for the oil and gas industry, has selected the Bedrock control system as the automation platform for its crude oil receipt and delivery points.
The Bedrock system will coordinate the flow of product from partners, through the Pinnacle processing facilities and onto refiners and shippers. Pinnacle chose Bedrock system for its scalability, ease of engineering, ruggedness, cost efficiencies, and intrinsic cyber security.
“We are expanding to meet the growing need for midstream services and need a secure way to centralize control of flow amongst our facilities. The Bedrock system provides an economical solution in a small, easy-to-implement system that can coordinate edge control today, while also scaling easily and economically to the full DCS functionality we expect to need in the future. We also liked the rugged Bedrock housing, which will resist the dust that gets into everything around here,” said Mike Hillerman, VP of Engineering and Operations for Pinnacle Midstream.
Formed by seasoned oil and gas industry professionals to meet the market need for efficient, secure midstream management, Pinnacle installs and operates assets, which facilitate oil and gas production and transportation.
Pinnacle provides a suite of services, including measurement, storage, compression, treatment, processing, and dehydration services to help partners ready products for the market. The speed with which it can move product from production wells, through its facilities, and onto the market is key to its profitability.
Pinnacle was looking to implement a control solution that could meet its pipeline control and safety needs today, and scale easily with it as it grows.
For help in identifying a solution, Pinnacle turned to Meers Engineering, a Texas-based systems integration firm, which was already implementing Inductive Automation's Ignition SCADA interface and management software. After a needs analysis, Meers recommended the Bedrock system.
“The Bedrock system is very start-up friendly. It delivers performance surpassing all mainstream systems and can scale easily as the user’s business grows. It uses state-of-the-art electronics and is designed to work for many years. Its free IEC 61131-3 compliant engineering tools also saved a great deal of coding time during the installation and will continue to reduce maintenance costs for many years to come,” said David Ibach, Meers Automation principal.
The Pinnacle implementation today populates the Bedrock pin-less backplane with ten I/O modules, including ten-channel universal I/O modules and a five-channel Ethernet module. The universal I/O modules connect to the field computers, which control flow at each storage tank, while the Ethernet I/O connects with edge devices and applications to mine data for subsequent planning and operational improvement. The Ethernet modules can also poll radios on wireless sensors simultaneously and support Power over Ethernet (PoE), which simplifies installation further by eliminating the need to run additional wiring to some of the devices.
Bedrock control modules also integrate switching and other functionality usually relegated to external devices, reducing wiring and installation costs. This also makes it very easy to scale up in 5, 10, 20 backplane unit increments. The first Bedrock system went online early in 2017 and has been exceeding expectations since. Evaluation for additional deployments – in the US and potentially globally -- is now underway.