Process Management Academy Europe 2011
Excellence in Safety and Sustainability
February 28 - March 1, 2011 - Antwerp, Belgium
Changing Mindsets Drive Evolution in Safety and Cyber Security
ARC held its Seventh Annual Process Management Academy (PMA) this year in Antwerp, Belgium, under the motto "Excellence in Safety and Sustainability". The forum was preceded by an invitation-only workshop on IT Security before focusing on two current topics: process safety and energy efficiency.
An interesting similarity shared by these topics is the effect of changing mindsets of top management. All three topics have been discussed for years, but recent events have pushed them to the forefront. For energy efficiency it was the oil price peak in 2008. Cyber security gained respect after the Stuxnet worm, and events like the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe have given new meaning to the importance of process safety. While for many years experts on the individual topics had a hard time convincing people of the benefits and return on investment, they now have a much easier task.
The Challenge of Cyber Security
The Cyber Security workshop brought together a select group of process end users, consultants, and technology providers. The group presented and discussed relevant topics, then documented the results so that participants can act on them and review these actions at the next workshop. Participants had little difficulty to agree on one thing – that reports of last year’s Stuxnet worm increased the urgency of cyber security in the collective mind of the process industries. Stuxnet, a sophisticated worm targeted at industrial control systems, showed the world just how vulnerable industrial plants can be. Before Stuxnet, investments in IT security were difficult to justify and process users relied on commercial security solutions, assuming that low-volume control systems would never become targets for cyber attacks or worms.
Trends in Process Safety
In terms of risk assessment, moving from IT security to process safety is a move from the unknown (security) to the known (safety). While IT security deals with an unknown threat and risks that are hard to quantify, safety deals with known threats and hazards where the impact on the environment and on plant production can be assessed in monetary terms. At PMA the main focus was on the integration of safety systems to achieve flexibility and increase plant performance.
The complexity of safety systems is rising. They are more interwoven in the control architecture and have become more dependent on information. In process applications, IT technology enables the flow of data between systems for control, safety, and production management. In today’s data-intensive manufacturing processes, the uninterrupted operation and control of the plant are only possible with constant data exchange. At the same time, new technologies such as wireless, remote maintenance, and computer configuration of field devices are increasing the intensity of existing communication. This creates new hazards, which may include faulty soft- or hardware, improper use of IT equipment, malware (virus, worm, Trojan horse), manipulation of demotivated employees (intentional equipment damage), or hacker attacks from outside the fence. Risk analysis today has to consider all of these areas, expanding the scope of process safety to take into account cyber security.
Trends in Energy Efficiency
Passive energy management means lowering energy consumption by using more energy efficient equipment. Soft starters, energy efficient motors, and leakage detection in pneumatic applications often have fast payback periods, helping to justify such investments. Active energy management, on the other hand, integrates real-time energy consumption information into the control architecture to help optimize the production process also along this variable. Compared to last year’s PMA, which looked mostly at passive initiatives, discussions this year centered more on active energy management. Two presentations were particularly interesting.
French energy-provider Total presented a case study of a recently completed control system migration at a Germany refinery. The goal of the project was a gradual replacement of existing DCS, PLC, and electrical control systems with a solution that integrates plant control with electrical systems control and monitoring functions. The new solution integrates information from electrical devices into the DCS in an effort better managed over 1400 electrical “consumers”, including motors, pumps, compressors, heaters, and air coolers. Emphasis was placed on creating manageable solutions without adding complexity.
Functions now integrated in Total’s new system include visualization of electrical network and all devices, alarm and event management, and automatic transfer of busbars to ensure plant availability if an electrical network should fail. In addition, the integrated solution allows for fast and slow load shedding of consumers to reduce power consumption and stabilize electrical networks, busbar load shedding in case of undervoltage, and intertrip/interlocking of circuit breakers for safety reasons.
While Total’s presentation was about increasing the overall efficiency of the plant, BASF presented a detailed technical solution of the company’s use of non-linear model predictive control (NMPC) to improving energy efficiency in a high-purity distillation column. The linear MPC had served the application well in previous years, thanks to a good business environment that allowed production to run at near 100% load. But when the bottom fell out of the markets in early 2009, LMPC didn’t handle sudden changes in the load well, resulting in a waste of steam, less predictable production, and volatile impurity. To address these new challenges, BASF turned to non-linear MPC to apply a more sophisticated approach to handle wildly fluctuating independent variables. In energy-intensive processes, running at just 60% load can drastically cut profitability if the system has been optimized for near-100% operation.
