Upstream
The upstream oil and gas industry is fundamental to energy production, involving the exploration and extraction of natural gas and crude oil from beneath the earth’s surface.
This industry relies on various applications, such as gas lift, wellhead compression, gas gathering, gas injection, flare gas recovery, and vapor recovery, all of which depend heavily on the reliable operation of rotating equipment. Key equipment includes reciprocating compressors, screw compressors, gas engines, pumps, and electric motors. These machines are essential for ensuring efficient, safe, and environmentally compliant operations.
Challenges
Gas lift operations, which help maintain oil production by injecting gas into wells, rely on positive displacement compressors that are prone to failures due to corrosion, high-pressure conditions, and liquid slugging.
Wellhead compression, critical for boosting gas pressure for transportation, can suffer from valve failures and cylinder wear in reciprocating compressors, leading to production bottlenecks.
Compressors in gas-gathering systems often encounter challenges such as flow instability and sand or liquid carryover erosion. Screw compressors in vapor recovery systems often face issues with seal failures, oil foaming and carryover, and contamination of lube oil with hydrocarbons, which can lead to environmental compliance challenges and equipment failures.
Why Use Mechademy’s Turbomechanica Platform
Data quality and volume can often be a challenge with the upstream industry as operations are spread out over remote areas that lack the appropriate communication infrastructure.
Physics-based process digital twins on the Turbomechanica platform do not require large volumes of data to detect faults early. When data quality is not an issue, machine learning and/or deep learning models are used to augment the data from the physics models to provide deeper insights into equipment health and performance. Turbomechanica's diagnostics algorithms perform multi-layered validations to provide high-confidence alerts. This is particularly valuable in remote upstream operations, where access to equipment for manual inspections is limited.
Results delivered to our upstream customers include:
Detection of cylinder valve leakage or damage with > 95% accuracy and an average lead time of two weeks
Detection of hydrocarbon liquid carryover into a VRU screw compressor, preventing catastrophic damage
Detection of gas engine cylinder head failure, preventing mechanical damage
"With a large installed base of reciprocating compressors, we have spent years in fire-fighting mode sending a tech out to site after a machine had tripped. With the Turbomechanica platform, we are able to get ahead of the failures and our techs are better prepared for site visits"
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