Presentation: PI System for Reliable Environmental & Sustainability Management

Corporate sustainability strategies are implemented and progress measured through sets of key performance indices (KPI) such as emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) and other pollutants that are of interest to stakeholders.  With the financial risks caused by GHG emissions cap and trade programs, companies must closely monitor the process data essential to accurately quantify emissions.  Reliable real-time data from the PI system can help companies to minimize/mitigate business risk associated with measuring and reporting environmental performance.  In addition, many environmental regulations set short-term (e.g., hourly) limits for emission source quantification that can be effectively tracked via process data available in the PI system.

Most plants monitor and track emissions indirectly with process data parameters and/or extract process data to calculation tools, such as Excel spreadsheets, to determine release quantities and demonstrate compliance.  If there are quality issues in the original PI process data due to instrument malfunctions, process shutdown, etc., engineers must manually correct/reconcile the data for compliance demonstration.  The process may require significant effort and can delay generation of necessary reports.  In order to provide reliable/actionable data to enable plant environmental teams to properly and quickly respond to any excursion or deviation of environmental limits, the source data must be validated and reconciled in real-time.

The “status” of the critical PI tags applied for environmental monitoring and tracking often can be validated based on other process operation indicators and the results are stored as digital state status tags.  After the status is established, a filtered or reconciled PI tag can be generated using the good raw data or a reconciled value based on process knowledge.  This has the effect of eliminating or minimizing variable discontinuities and proffers the most accurate available information for environmental monitoring and decision making.  With reconciled PI data, subsequent environmental calculations configured in PI performance equations can be executed to provide real-time environmental reporting data.  The resulting environmental data are most reliable for the development of meaningful sustainability strategies.  The readily accessible data also allow companies to actively and immediately compare against regulatory limitations and quickly take actions to mitigate problems.

This real-time data validation and reconciliation process has been successfully implemented at a large gas processing plant in Qatar, which requires various reports, which involve continuous emissions monitoring systems and flare events.  The environmental team is able to generate reliable environmental emission reports with 100% reconciled PI data.  This data treatment process can be applied by all companies using the PI System to general reliable data for all critical business and environmental measurements.