Process simulation on oil and gas LNG facilities must be performed during FEED(front-end engineering design) phase and operational.

FEED process simulation must focus on designing all of the engineering process across facilities starting from natural gas extraction from subsea all the way to the gas processing at onshore/off shore gas processing facilities before building the facilities to calculate CAPEX and choosing/validate process design, while process simulation during the operational stage are focusing on overall operation efficiency such as production optimization, maintenance, asset integrity etc during the facilities operation.

Operational Simulation for Oil and Gas Facilities

There are four critical area which require extensive process simulation during operational stages to check simulate the plant/facilities behavior including production, energy, asset availability & HSSE with following angle: risk prevention, risk control and response readiness

Process simulation during operation stages is done using data driven approach to simulate the near actual plant behavior. Plant data that usually reside on historian will be fed into the simulation software and combined with business/operational information to perform the simulation.

Below are the typical process simulation that available on oil and gas facilities especially for LNG (liquified natural gas)

  1. Process Dynamics Simulation - Determine the normal target operating points of process data such as energy consumption, temperature, flowrate and pressure during normal operation condition. Heavily used during FEED phases especially at design and sizing stage but also used during operation stage (weekly/monthly) especially for process optimization.
  2. Steady-state simulation - Determine what will happeneded if the plant experiencing changes including operational changes (shutdown, startup), environmental changes (weather), productional changes (reduced gas pressure on well head) and so on.

— both of process dynamic and steady state simulation are used during FEED and operation phase.

Key player on simulation of steady-state process and dynamic process

There are five major companies who lead this market including S&C Optiramp, Honeywell Unisym, Aspentech hysys, Yokogawa petro SIM and Siemens sim center with focus on following cases:

  1. Aspentech Hysys - Founded in 1981. Famous for the matured process simulation model with large support community. Used mostly by oil and gas organization
  2. Honeywell unisym - Founded in 1906. Widely known as major player on the industrial automation like yokogawa. Used mostly by oil and gas organization
  3. Yokogawa Petrosim - Founded in 1915. well known for industry automation through their DCS/digital control system product and Used mostly by oil and gas organization.
  4. Siemens Sim Center - Founded in 1847. Famous for engineering solution. Major users came from energy industry

Key Consideration

In term of model richness, aspentech hysys is ahead compared to other competitor because the solution is specifically built for steady state and dynamics simulation and has been there for the last 30+ years. Moreoever, aspentech hysys is widely used on college/universiry lecture as their main to-be-taught software just like ERP(Enterprise resource planning) is known to be used as student to-be-taught software.

However, in terms of interoperability, aspentech hysys is lacking behind compared to yokogawa petro sim and honeywell unisym because they also providing control system solution (DCS/SCADA). Their process simulation software can be natively integrated to the plant contorl system. Lastly, siemens has multi discipline simulation, not limited into oil adn gas related process including electrical and mechanical simulation.