2020 was a turbulent year. But even in the most troubling of times, critical infrastructure must continue to operate uninterrupted, which is where our Sensia customer field operations support team come in. During the height of the global pandemic Field Support Engineer, EIT graduate and six-year veteran of Rockwell Automation and Sensia, Shayla George, travelled offshore to one of BP’s Deepwater oil and gas platform, to support their Subsea ControlLogix Redundancy Upgrade Project. This meant going above and beyond with extraordinary measures – keeping the health of our entire team paramount, whilst ensuring the continued operation of the platform. Not a simple task on a rig at sea, where working and living conditions can make social distancing a challenge. Working in this kind of environment presents numerous risks and meant Shayla would need to begin her journey with a 14-day period of self-isolation, followed by a lonely drive to her BP-secured lodging. Following a further seven days in quarantine here, she was able to embark on her helicopter transit offshore, where she was greeted by Covid-19 screening and an antibody blood test before making it aboard the rig. Only then could the work begin. The scope of this project consisted of upgrading the current subsea controllers to ControlLogix L75 processors. This would provide more memory and processing power for the new well expansions that would soon be brought online for the Deepwater platform. In addition, the existing redundant racks were replaced with a new redundancy package which included CN2R ControlNet Redundant Interface Modules and RM2 ControlLogix Redundancy Enhanced Modules. These subsea controllers communicate over ControlNet to topside safety controllers and subsea I/O controllers. While none of the wells on these subsea controllers were active at the time, it was critical to be able to successfully perform this upgrade without causing any interference to the ControlNet Network – preventing any process upset from happening on the topside safety controllers and shutting in the platform. Following the successful completion of this project we’d like to extend our thanks to Shayla for her dedication to successfully getting this over the line while exemplifying our guiding values of being quick to react and adaptable to change, and taking the initiative even in these most challenging of times.
