Every day, in the North Sea, the Forties platform exports 36,000 barrels of condensate and other liquids from 85 fields, supplying up 30% of the United Kingdom’s oil production. Brüel & Kjær Vibro products have already been installed on 16 offshore platforms in this area since 1995, as well as many other platforms world-wide. Now, two more installations can be added to the list of platforms in the North Sea using Brüel & Kjær Vibro technology.

On both platforms, the export compressors for natural gas, and export pumps for condensate and liquids, will be protected and continuously monitored by the VC-8000 condition monitoring and machine protection system. Data from the six racks will be stored in the customer’s OSIsoft ®PI System® database, making it easy to correlate with process data and monitoring data from other platforms. By utilising the historian interface, there is neither a need for an expensive proprietary database/monitoring server nor the expensive license fees that come with it. Data can be shared across the enterprise.

VC-8000 was selected to monitor the critical export compressors and pumps, to maximize reliability and ensure uptime. The CATS pipeline exports 250 million standard cubic feet (mmscfd) of natural gas every day, from these two platforms, which in total accounts for almost 15% of the total 1700 mmscfd of natural gas capacity carried by the pipeline to the Teeside terminal. This pipeline, which is connected to 30 fields, supplies 14% of UK’s gas production.

The North Sea is a harsh and unforgiving place, but fortunately, a place where the VC-8000 from Brüel & Kjær Vibro is happy to live, keeping the energy needs of the United Kingdom supplied.