Diesel and Gas Turbine Worldwide

One of the projects where the Cogsys software, Alert, is providing process and machinery Key Performance Indices (KPI) is on the Greenstream Interconnector pipeline at the Mellitah gas terminal on Libya’s Mediterranean coast. Greenstream is part of the Western Libya Gas Project and connects Mellitah to Gela in Sicily.

Performance Indicators
Key for Cogsys Software

A growing trend within the global energy industry is for large-scale capital projects to be co-developed by a consortium of major international companies keen to commercially develop key hydrocarbon reserves.

However, it is increasingly common for remaining reserves to be relatively remote from important energy markets, thus necessitating large-scale infrastructure to be put in place to make investment economically sound.

Post commissioning, the projects also need strategies to be put in place to monitor and manage all of the key activities that have an immediate commercial impact such as core plant operations and maintenance.

This is to ensure the consortium stakeholders look forward to a return on their investment and to support the continued plant availability, reliability, security of supply and safety. This can often include the need to generate performance Key Performance Indices (KPIs) to manage third-party service level agreements and contracts, to support equipment warranties and to monitor plant performance.

On such large scale, multibillion-

dollar projects, some consortia are turning to companies that are independent of original equipment manufacturers to provide KPIs to measure and assess operation and maintenance, and the performance of long-term service agreements. With today’s microproces-sor-based plant automation systems it is argued that benefits can be achieved with integrated software solutions that may provide a quick payback period.

“Such computer-based solutions that offer KPIs are becoming a feature within several sectors of the energy industry including oil and gas production and transmission, the liquefied natural gas supply chain and the independent water and power production sector,” said Chris Dagnall, products and services manager of Cogsys, which is based in Manchester, England.

Cogsys provides engineering software and services to carry out performance monitoring of gas turbine and compressor equipment. The performance package has been implanted on more than 90 gas turbines both for compression and power generation duties.

The Cogsys software, called Alert, is a performance management and a pre-

dictive emissions monitoring system (PEMS) that has been providing technology for U.K. integrated pollution control (IPC) and integrated pollution prevention and control (IPPC) environmental compliance monitoring since 1995. The software also provides a foundation for implementing energy and CO₂monitoring in response to the EC Emissions Trading Scheme, according to Cogsys.

One of the projects where Alert is providing process and machinery KPI through online software is on the Greenstream Interconnector pipeline at the Mellitah gas terminal on Libya’s Mediterranean coast. Greenstream is part of the Western Libya Gas Project and connects Mellitah to Gela in Sicily. It is 520 km long, has a diameter of 813 mm and was laid at a depth of 1127 m.

Gas produced from the Wafa field in the desert and Bahr Essalam, offshore, is sent to Mellitah and then transported to Italy through the Greenstream pipeline.

The terminal’s new gas compression facility includes four gas turbine trains driving twin barrel centrifugal compressors that raise the gas pressure from 30 bar to 150 bar to push it across the pipeline to Italy. Waste heat from the gas turbines is fed through two waste heat recovery steam generators to produce steam for the process duties on the terminal.

Cogsys said that the Greenstream consortium needed online software that provided equipment-specific thermodynamic performance calculations for each turbo compressor train and the overall station, to simulate possible plant configuration (different combinations of plant and process duties) to get the highest efficiency for given scheduled capacity throughput of gas at prevailing ambient conditions and also to monitor the performance of the plant and each turbo-com-pressor train, and provide KPI data summarizing deviation of current actual condition versus design/con-tractual values.