Oil & Gas Solutions

Many industries have turned to Viking SCADA units over the years. Here are some of our product solutions and product installations over the years.

Variable Speed/Frequency Drive

A variable speed drive may be controlled at a distance using Viking SCADA units. Depending on the type of drive, the speed may be raised or lowered and other features may be operated. The Viking SCADA units provide automatic shutdown in the case of any system or communication failures.

Field Control and Monitoring

Viking SCADA units allow you to remotely monitor both high and low levels of a tank and control the fill/drain pumps from 25 miles away without interconnecting wires. The Viking SCADA devices provide automatic local and remote alarms for power or system failures, plus full function operation for hours using the internal battery back-up.

Access Control and Monitoring

In this example, we supplied a pair of wireless Viking SCADA 4ADI-5DO3 units to remotely protect monitor and control access to a secure location up to 25 miles away. Alarms are activated whenever access is required or gained. The electrical lock may be controlled remotely or locally. Remote indication is supplied to show if the door is securely closed or is opened, as well as a full visual status of conditions. Alarms indicate all faults and abnormal conditions, such as power fail or forced entry.

Security and Environmental Systems

Without any interconnecting wires, the Viking SCADA 4ADI-5DO3 and our other models can control and continuously monitor environmental systems, such as pumps, fountains, heaters and security devices. Alarms are activated to indicate any fault conditions, and battery back-up provides full operation during power failures.

Multiple Tanks, Pumps and Remote Control Systems

From up to 25 miles and without wires, the Viking SCADA 4ADI-5DO3 and more advanced units can control and continuously monitor multiple pumps, tanks, VSDs, switch contacts, security devices, analog signal input levels, analog output signals and more. Alarms and shutdowns may be activated from any location to indicate fault conditions, with every unit monitoring the network condition and reverting to a known state during error conditions. In the example diagrams, four Viking SCADA units are configured so analog and digital signals may be transmitted and monitored between four locations. Up to 255 Viking SCADA units may be in a single network, providing over 1,000 inputs and outputs.

Simple Systems with
Pumps and Tank

In this example, the Viking SCADA 16ADI-9D2AO has integrated controls to implement routines commonly performed with an additional PLC, computer or control logic, including the dual-pump/toggling mode often used for reliability and system test cycles. This removes the need for extra control equipment, allowing additional cost savings, reducing in installation time and reliability improvements. Here, the level of a remote tank is monitored, either by an analog level transducer and/or limit switches. The local pump or pumps may be operated either by a simple contactor or an adjustable analog output signal may be supplied to control the speed of a VSD (variable speed drive). Note that the Viking SCADA provides a very easy interface to these devices, and can even provide the power to the analog tank 4-20mA pressure transducer saving additional costs.

CNW

CNW is a company owning oil pipelines, transfer pumps, oil wells and tank batteries in the Oklahoma City area. For several years they have used Viking Scada equipment at several ‘standalone’ locations which typically have a tank battery being supplied from remote pumps; the original Viking Scada equipment was primarily used to prevent tanks from overflowing. Some of the sites had alarm dialers for basic alarm notification, others had lights that could be seen from the freeway, and others had nothing but frequent pampering by ‘pumpers’, the oilfield operators.

One or more pumpers would drive from site to site all day and monitor activity, stopping and starting various pumps, adjusting flow settings, tank level trip points etc. Even a short power interruption that took down part of a field would require hours of coordinated effort with several people to bring the field back up, as pumps had to be enabled in certain sequences when conditions were suitable.

The sites are spread out over a distance of about 8 miles in heavily populated residential and commercial areas, with freeways, shopping malls, railways and rivers separating sites. There were other challenges: spills from tanks or pipelines (several very old and crossing rivers) could be catastrophic plus many sites are in areas subject to theft and vandalism; equipment costing thousands of dollars had been ruined as thieves cut live high voltage copper cables on running equipment.

CNW and Viking SCADA

CNW asked Viking SCADA to implement a SCADA system to improve the situation. Viking SCADA telemetry products have been used on many similar oil field systems before, and all of them use DAQFactory as the PC SCADA interface. Some of the larger ones have hundreds of I/O points and alarms, spread over 30 miles between sites; some are simple with just a few I/O points such as a rural water tank and pump. Although each system is different most have similar common components such as alarms, logging and graphs. Over several years Viking SCADA has built a web application which has become the core of its telemetry and SCADA systems; it encompasses all functions that are common for this type of application. Building a new application for customers such as CNW can now be done very quickly, since all that is needed is to design the application specific screens, define I/O that will be needed and enter site specific data such as alarm and statistical conditions. Many of these tasks, such as creating a new alarm or calibrating a new flow transducer may be performed by the operator as the application runs -without requiring a ‘guru’ programmer or even stopping the program. There are many benefits to this especially at very remote sites without internet, phones and service personnel nearby.

CNW’s system required installing a Viking Scada unit with a 5 Watt UHF radio at each site, with these radios small whip antennas provide communications back to the office several miles away; the antennas are not obvious and are located out of vandals reach. All existing auto-dialers were thrown away and one cellular modem was added to the master – an immediate saving from several phone lines. The cellular modem (RV50) has a complementary web browser application where user can easily login to from their phone or PC. The RV50 directly generates and decodes the Viking Scada ‘over the air’ protocol which compresses much more data into a packet than Modbus. Another benefit is a very fast scan time, in this application every unit and every I/O point in the whole system is accessed by the RV50 at least every 10 seconds, so alarms may be set with very short trip times. The Viking SCADA web application also has a voice, text & email for alarm callouts and be accessed remotely to push data to the units.

Operating the lease has been completely different since the system has been implemented. All activity may be monitored and controlled from anywhere in the world and graphs going back months display pump activity and flow rates through various pipelines; changes in flows are monitored to help identify leaks. Pumps may be directly controlled and set-points adjusted from the Viking SCADA web application, without requiring a site visit. With the applications standard capability to handle alarm groups, ‘on duty’ time & day shift rosters for phone dialing and text messages alarm callouts are now much more flexible plus easier to configure. Alarm text messages may be sent simultaneously to all pumpers cell phones, at the same time the dialer calls out to the first ‘on duty’ pumper and speaks the alarm. If the callout is not acknowledged or answered then the application calls the next on duty employee, cycling through them all until it is acknowledged. Using alarm groups allows certain alarms to be routed to different groups of pumpers that may be responsible for different lease sections. All activity is logged to daily history files along with accumulated statistics, such as pump stop / start cycles. Now an operator standing in the field next to a well is able to make changes in seconds and observe activity, even to equipment miles away. The complete system may be observed and controlled without even returning to the office. Running the Viking SCADA application has drastically improved the lease operations, and CNW will be adding another 10 sites in the next few months. The upgrade probably will not even need a site visit, since Viking Scada units will be installed by CNW’s employees and the RV50 cellular modem can be modified remotely. CNW says the system has already paid for itself many times over.

Water & Waste Water Solutions

Fluid Resource Management provides design/build/operation services to the Water, Wastewater, and Winery industries throughout California. Part of their service to clients is providing cost effective operation support to various sites, some of which are in remote areas of our service area. Their typical operator could easily drive 150-200 miles per day making the “rounds” to his assigned clients with a lot of unproductive windshield time.

FRM & Viking SCADA

FRM saw the potential of using Viking SCADA Callout Systems coupled with Viking SCADA products to provide remote monitoring of alarm conditions and provide a reliable method for remote set point control. This, coupled with the graphing and logging capability allows FRM to troubleshoot each system in real-time from their office and in many cases correct the situation with just a phone call to the client’s staff. Using the alarming feature built into the Viking SCADA Callout System they can respond to repairs quickly by knowing ahead of time what exactly the problem is.

Since using Viking SCADA Callout System, their staff has become more productive by not being required to make daily visits to check tank levels, residuals, pH/D.O. levels, and log pump runtimes. The annual cost savings to their company in fuel alone is remarkable. One particular client required daily site inspections to record a number of data sets. At 100 miles roundtrip, it was clear that remote site monitoring/control would be effective in holding the cost down to our client.

Using Viking SCADA Systems and Viking SCADA equipment, the site is now fully automated and process alarmed. This allows FRM staff to monitor the system from anywhere, and has cut back the number of trips from seven per week to once per week. A savings of over $500 per month in fuel alone. The drive time normally spent every day is now used for other projects that actually benefit from having onsite personnel.

PC Application Solutions

Viking SCADA has developed control software based on Azeotechs (link) DAQFactory product offering.

This software provides SCADA capability for Viking SCADA plus other brands of hardware, and offers comprehensive features that are common to many oilfield, rural water, municipality, winery, WWTP, and other industrial uses. This software application can be quickly customized for your system, at a very economical cost, and typically does not even require a site visit. Applications based on this software can vary from simple one tank, one pump sites to complex oil fields and plants with hundreds of I/O points. We can provide the software or a complete pre-configured PC and tested system.

Viking SCADA PC Software Application for Data Acquisition and Control

Here is a list of some of the basic features and how we can configure them for your site specific situation and controls.

Alarms

Using our PC applications, we can set alarms that are fully configurable by the operator, even when the program is running.

When alarms are tripped, they perform one or more of the following functions:

Play audio alert files.
Pop-up warnings on the screen.
Dial out and speak the alarm.
Dial out and play .wav files.
Send email alarms.
Send text messages.
Printing of an alarm report.
Call up a radio transmitter to play an audio .wav file over a radio network.

All parameters may be set for every single alarm, giving maximum flexibility to the operator. All alarm activity, including acknowledges (or lack of them), are logged to the history file. You may also configure the system to send alarms to multiple people sequentially, automatically rolling to next responders if there is no acknowledgement. Support is included for multiple “groups” (i.e. for different fields of an oil lease) and time schedules for each user, and are easily configured to handle alarm calls for different shifts and weekends. Again, you can choose to make the alarms phone, email and/or text messages.

Statistics

Statistics are automatically accumulated. The data can be set for various types of collection, such as analog levels, on/off start count and run times, pulse counts from flow meters, and more. Daily text files are created that contain minimum/maximum/averages for the day, week and month, as well as since starting for all parameters. These can be automatically emailed every day if needed, and may be viewed at any time.

History

History logs are generated for all alarm events, such as alarms firing or being acknowledged. Other events can be selected for automatic addition to the history log. These would typically not cause an alarm to fire, but may be events such as a filter back-flush or a consumable supply tank being refilled.

Calibration

Calibration may be invoked at any time. If a transducer needs to be replaced in the future, it is simple to recalibrate while the program runs. There is no need to modify the application or have specialized programming knowledge.

Maintenance

Maintenance monitoring is easy to set-up.

Track power on, run times, starts, and events for any I/O device. Compare them to presettable maintenance scheduled if needed. The maintenance screen shows the current status. Daily maintenance status reports in text format are generated and can be automatically emailed. When maintenance is performed, instructions appear for the service personnel who may also enter text notes of any actions performed. All of this data is also logged. Alarms can be set for individual and/or “worst case” maintenance items. For example, many operators choose to get a text message or phone call when the maintenance status is at 90%.

Graphs

Graphs show historical values such as tank levels, pump activity, VSD currents. It is simple to zoom into an event of interest or scroll back in time to see what may have happened weeks ago. Typical applications have a 10-second time resolution and would store several months of data, but this is fully configurable, depending on the application. All data may be exported for analysis with programs such as Microsoft® Excel®.

Set Points, Controls, Indicators, and Graphics

These features are easily added for your specific application in a very short time and at an economical cost.