OPC Centralizes Historian Data for Regulatory Inspections

The Kinder Morgan Pacific Liquids Pipeline Operations unit operates a 3,000-mile refined petroleum products pipeline on the West Coast, serving Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas.  Kinder Morgan started using products from Canary Labs on the Pacific Liquids Pipeline in 2000. Wheatland Systems was contracted to provide control systems at each of the pumping stations and bulk storage terminals, which included Canary as a reliable historian and trending facility. Each of the 27 locations has dual systems, a primary and secondary historian for data collection and storage of the stations operations and performance parameters.

Kinder Morgan wanted to consolidate the historical data from all the remote stations to two central facilities: Orange and Mission Valley. The system operations at each of the remote locations could not be affected. This was needed to support the regulatory reporting and monitoring requirements.  The historical data from each of the remote historians needed to be centralized and maintained for long-term storage of a minimum three years. A very simple and easy to use tool was needed to access the critical data for regulatory inspections and meet the following conditions:

•    Kinder Morgan needed the data from each of the 54 Canary Historians at the remote locations to be consolidated back to two central data centers at Orange and Mission Valley. •   The regulatory data had to be accessible from either of these two systems and the systems should back each other up.•   The network connection to some of the remote sites has limited bandwidth. Any file transfer must not consume the bandwidth needed for on-going operations.•   The tool to display the data trends must be accessible from any location (via Internet Explorer Browser). It must be so easy to use that it requires no training.•   Minimum impact on the systems at the remote locations.•   Centralized system management for configuration and licensing for the entire system.•   Turnkey solution with on-site installation and training.The Canary Trend Historian along with the Trend Link/Trend Web standard products handled the heart of the project utilizing the OPC-HDA standard.  The hardware solution was two standard Dell Servers with 2 terabyte data storage units (oversized at the request of Kinder Morgan to handle 6 years of data).Viewing the dataThrough the Internet Explorer Browser, users access a URL on the corporate site. The page contains the general selection criteria for the regulatory data to view and incorporates the Canary Trend Web viewer.The simple and easy-to-use selection criteria consist of:

1. Site/Pipeline Location (from drop-down list)
2. Primary or Backup Server (Orange or Mission Valley)
3. Primary or Secondary Data Sets
4. Date and Time to Display
5. Time Duration of the Chart
6. Chart Size

Key performance tags for the site are predefined in a chart for each location and displayed automatically within Trend Web.The software installation and configuration was so simple and easy it was determined that having Canary personnel on-site to perform these operations was not necessary. The training on the product was very straight forward and after walking through a demonstration via the remote link, it was evident that further training sessions were unnecessary.Troy Bower, Manger SCADA IT, states, "The system is very intuitive to use and configure. It provides excellent diagnostic logs and reports. Canary Labs has exceeded my expectations and I am very pleased with the outcome of the project."Kinder Morgan now has centralized historian data for regulatory inspections, with a system that is easy to use, easy to maintain, network friendly and reliable. It displays data trends showing pipeline performance information at any location, quickly and in a format that is easy to understand.For more information about historical trending solutions from Canary Labs, visit www.canarylabs.com.