Foundation Fieldbus for Yokogawa

Yokogawa Electric has been awarded a contract to supply Foundation Fieldbus (FF) instrumentation for the Groningen gas field development project in Europe. The contract was awarded to the Stork GLT consortium, of which Yokogawa is one of the partners.

This new contract complements the original 60 million euro (AU$103 million) order placed in 2002 for the south gas field's automation system, and will replace the conventional DCS with a state-of-the-art digital control system based on FF technology as recommended by Yokogawa. Being worth 38 million euro (AU$65 million), this latest contract will be one of the largest FF-based digital control system in the world.

The facilities are located in the province of Groningen, Netherlands. Stork GLT is a consortium, which consists of Stork Industry Services (construction and maintenance management), Jacobs Engineering Group (design), Siemens Demag Delaval Turbomachinery (compressors), Siemens (Compressor Motors) and Yokogawa (Main Instrument Vendor).

Yokogawa was one of the founders of the Stork-GLT consortium in 1996 when the first phase of this long-term gas project began, and has been in charge of the design, supply, installation and maintenance of a variety of measurement and control instruments as well as a Centum CS 3000 R3 integrated production control system, an instrumented protection system, and an Exaquantum plant information management system. Ultimately, 29 clusters and 296 gas wells will be controlled and operated remotely from a central control room.

The FF technology reduces both the amount of wiring required for equipment installation and the number of field devices that must be installed. In addition, it reduces the amount of engineering work such as start up, construction and field work, and enables both predictive maintenance and remote troubleshooting.