Enalysis Version 5.0 - Optimizing for Power Savings

Enalysis Version 5.0 is now live and offers a new and greatly improved user experience allowing customers to better identify, investigate and act on valuable opportunities for improving their assets’ and fleets’ performance. In addition to improving the overall user experience, Enalysis Version 5.0 is built on an entirely new platform dramatically improving the software’s scalability, ability to deliver new features in a rapidly evolving market, and capability for users to work seamlessly on their mobile devices.

This post is the second of four in a series aimed to showcase how Enalysis Version 5.0 will improve how you can deliver value to your company. The focus for this post is to walk through how a user can identify, investigate and evaluate power saving opportunities utilizing the latest version. 

Background on Power Saving Opportunities

In 2015 as the price and oil and gas plummeted, Detechtion committed itself to helping its clients further reduce operating costs by introducing algorithms aimed to identify cost saving opportunities. The new calculation set provides an accurate approximation of the power savings achievable for the inefficiencies Enalysis is able to identify, which is then translated into an annual operating cost reduction. The new set of calculations identifies inefficiencies in assets based on; the amount they are bypassing/recycling, the pressure drops between stages, any inefficiency within a cylinder or excessive over/under compression in rotary screw compressors.

Moreso than anything else, the most impactful power saving opportunities are instances where the compressor is recycling gas when it does not need to be. What this implies is that the asset is compressing more gas than is required, leading to inefficiencies. To improve performance of the asset in the scenario where the asset is bypassing gas, the compressor often has to under-go a configuration change to decrease utilization (eg. Reduce RPM, Open Pockets, Install Spacers, Single-Act, Reduction to set-points, etc). It has been our experience that unless you can associate a tangible benefit to reduction to utilization, the perceived benefit to move these projects and opportunities forward is low. In our experience, optimizing for power savings is a low capital, high return project. Enalysis is the tool that is used to both identify the fuel/power saving opportunity, and tool that is used to determine the optimized configuration.

Identifying Power Saving Opportunities

To first identify a power savings opportunity, Enalysis V5.0 has made it much easier to identify and investigate opportunities within your compressor fleet. Enalysis V5.0 surfaces opportunities across your fleet to effortlessly identify what assets present optimization opportunities on the Dashboard. Utilizing the capabilities of the dashboard, you can drill further into your assets to look in depth at the assets that contribute to the opportunities available to you. 

The following video outlines how you can navigate between a fleet level overview to an asset-by-asset overview which allows our users to identify the opportunities presented to them. In the following example, Enalysis has identified a compressor with a potential power saving opportunity of $36,000/Year.

Investigating Power Saving Opportunities

When you've identified an asset that presents an opportunity to optimization, utilize the vital signs to assess the performance and operating conditions of your asset. To understand the performance of your equipment, you will want to understand the expected and desired operating range of your equipment.

The following example highlights the types of details we would be looking to capture to then move onto the evaluation step. 

The goal based on the data is to maintain the current pressures and production at a reduced fuel usage. 

The following video outlines how you can navigate from the fleet level overview to drill into the asset of your choice to determine the optimization potential. 

Evaluating Power Saving Opportunities

When the goal has been determined, the simulator can then be leveraged to determine whether the optimization can be achieved. The goal in this is to determine if adjusting the configuration will allow the machine to reduce its fuel consumption while maintaining pressures and production. To perform the simulation, a user can navigate directly from vital signs to the simulator. For performing the simulations, please refer to the following post for details: Performance Modeling with Enalysis Simulator

The outcome of the simulation exercise indicates that production and pressures can be maintained while reducing total fuel usage from 67mscfd to 24mscfd by reducing the assets total capacity. The capacity reduction is achieved by reducing the speed to the drivers minimum speed of 1200, and further capacity reduction by opening pockets and non-acting one of the first stage cylinders.

If the new configuration is deemed promising, utilize the "send to engineer" functionality to receive a more in-depth review of the assets limitations, and guidance on how to set the compressors operating set points. 

The following video outlines how you can utilize the Enalysis simulator in combination with the operating data from the assets vital signs to evaluate the validity of the opportunity.