AUTOMATION & SAFET Y
Uptake of automation, remote
operations enhances need for
systematic alarm management
Panel: False alarms can sow human distrust
in automation, while lack of interoperability
is still leading to pain points for end users
BY JESSICA WHITESIDE, CONTRIBUTOR
Disciplined alarm rationalization helped
Murphy Oil cut alarm notifications from
its Eagle Ford Shale production sites from
10,000-plus a week to just approximately
100. The key to this dramatic result? “Brute
force methodology,” said Dale Bradford,
Murphy’s Vice President, Global HSE.
Speaking on a panel about automa-
tion and safety systems at the 2022 IADC
Advanced Rig Technology Conference in
Austin on 31 August, Mr Bradford said the
company used the International Society of
Automation Alarm Management Standard
18.2 to guide the process of rationalizing
each alarm in a given facility.
Alarms that indicated an abnormal situ-
ation requiring an immediate response
from the operator, that had a defined action
for the operator to take within a given
time, and that would lead to a defined
consequence if the operator ignored the
alarm, were maintained. Alarms that did
not meet this criteria were eliminated.
This rationalization process was not com-
plicated but was “very brutal,” Mr Bradford
said. “You’re sitting in rooms with a group
of folks that manage this every day and
banging away at every alarm and rational-
izing and changing and recoding systems
to eliminate the issue,” he added.
So far, the company has conducted
more than 17 facility reviews in the Eagle
Ford Shale. Only a small fraction of the
thousands of alerts and alarms assessed
during the rationalization process were
real exceedances that required action.
Many turned out to be information that
was useful or needed for various purposes
but that was not truly an actionable, prob-
lematic issue to deal with, Mr Bradford
said. “We’ve just gotten started, and we’ve
already seen some pretty incredible
results.” Managing alarms for remote
operations Murphy has been pursuing sensors and
automation primarily to monitor process-
es and provide data for predictive mainte-
nance at its upstream production facilities
(e.g., monitoring conditions such as pres-
sure, vibration, temperature, fluid rates,
fire and gas) to ensure that they are oper-
ating within the guardrails for safety, Mr
Bradford said.
Managing alarms was not a significant
problem when field-located management
was the norm, with crews dedicated to
each field and facility. However, as Murphy
Oil began concentrating its onshore pro-
duction in the Eagle Ford and Canadian
shale fields with sites scattered many
miles apart, the company moved to an
“operated by exception” model that uses
a remote operations center and dynamic,
data-driven crew routing to manage a
large number of sites across vast dis-
tances. “We simply must rely more on instru-
mentation and automation to keep track
of everything,” Mr Bradford said. Under the
remote operations concept, information,
alarms and data from multiple facilities,
pads and wells are routed to one center –
concentrating the alarms and information
on a small group of people who were deal-
ing with “a ridiculous number of alarms,”
Mr Bradford said. The volume of alarms
made it challenging for people to focus
on their work, and the situation was not
sustainable. “In the past, frankly, we could get away
with less-than-wonderful alarm manage-
ment because we had people there to look
at it and to understand it,” he said. “That’s
not the case anymore.”
There’s a school of thought that when
an alarm occurs, it’s already too late for
safety: Something has already gone wrong,
and it’s a very reactive mode to be in,
Mr Bradford said. While talking about
alarm management can, therefore, feel “old
school,” getting a handle on alarm man-
agement is a precursor to “a world where
we can be more proactive and actually be
ahead of the situation,” he said. “We must
sort out this reactive alarm management
situation so that we can have reasonable
data and have people be able to pay atten-
tion to the right things – and then we may
be able to develop the trust in the system.”
“Nobody trusts 10,000 alarms a week. If
we can move beyond that and develop that
trust, then we can start considering actual
automation.” Building trust in automation
Distrust of automation is one of the
key challenges the drilling sector must
overcome if it is to use automation to
deliver higher standards of process safety,
said Rafael Guedes de Carvalho, Project
Manager, Schlumberger, another panelist
from the same session at the conference.
Mr Carvalho noted that a 2021
International Association of Oil and Gas
Producers report found that three-quarters
of incidents leading to a well control event
were related to human factors, and at
least half of those were people not follow-
ing procedures. Automation could help
the humans in the equation make better
decisions and, where possible, enable sys-
tems to make those decisions instead of
humans, he said.
In this case, validation of data quality
is critical. If the data that automated sys-
tems are collecting is not good, “we some-
times have the risk of overwhelming the
operators with alarms that are not actually
accurate,” he commented. “Every time we
have a false alarm, we have the conse-
quence of lack of trust in the system.”
DRILLING CONTRACTOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022
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