An onshore wellsite and central tank battery, a dedicated Safety Instrumented System distinct from the BPCS, hazardous-area instrumentation, and SCADA telemetry for unmanned remote wellheads.
The project brief: 12 producing wellheads gathered into a central tank battery running a three-phase separator train, gas compression, and custody-transfer metering, spread across a mile or more of unmanned field with no hardwired path back to the control room. Every field instrument sits in a classified hazardous area, and the emergency shutdown logic runs on a physically and logically separate Safety Instrumented System rather than as interlocks inside the process PLC — a first for this program.
This module walks the whole project the way a real automation engineer would: intrinsically safe versus explosion-proof instrumentation selection, a worked control-valve Cv sizing calculation on the separator’s oil-dump valve, the ESD system’s level-1/2/3 architecture with a fully worked SIL verification (sensor, logic solver, and final element PFDavg summed against the SIL 2 target), why shutdown valves fail closed while blowdown valves fail open, custody-transfer metering accuracy, and why remote wellsite SCADA polls report-by-exception over radio and cellular telemetry instead of continuous scanning. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.