Most companies in the natural gas supply chain have deployed smart devices and connected equipment (the Internet of Things). With all this diagnostics data available to measurement teams, most opt to manage critical infrastructure with monitoring dashboards that can only provide a snapshot view. Far fewer organizations analyze the data they collect or leverage automated business logic. In other words, they aren’t realizing the value of their IoT investments. That’s what makes C-SMART Analytics valuable.
C-SMART Analytics is a cloud, enterprise-grade solution that connects to your measurement diagnostics data sources, manages your measurement diagnostics in a single database, and provides business logic that automatically analyzes your diagnostics and alerts you to issues. On average C-SMART Analytics identifies 6,700 Mscf in potential LAUF per meter per year. Below illustrates C-SMART Analytics’ average results normalized to 100 meter sites per year.
These results are based on data collected over three-and-a-half years from more than 100 metering stations, normalized to 100 stations per year. The average station flow for the data set was 42 MMscf. The average number of meters per station was one and a half.
With the abundance of IoT data and pervasive number of measurement errors impacting corporate margins, continuous monitoring just makes sense. Simply put, it’s a matter of managing risk. Periodic onsite testing has a long list of shortcomings. A snapshot-based approach leaves plenty of time between checks for trouble to hide, undetected. You can’t catch intermittent errors or real-time issues. Taking equipment out of service is disruptive and can also lead to additional issues. Sending your skilled people into the field to check, adjust, and experiment to find a solution on-the-fly puts them at risk and makes audits and transparency much more complex. You may not know about problems; but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.
Remote, continuous monitoring addresses these issues. With C-SMART Analytics, you collect information continuously. Errors – even intermittent ones – are detected in near real time. C-SMART Analytics has been successfully used to identify pressure transmitter problems, failed ultrasonic meter paths, blockages, chronic k-factor errors, and much more. This constant, non-intrusive approach is simple and transparent and will increase the precision and long-term health of your remote flow measurement systems.