Safely Commissioning a Power Management System for a Centenarian Oil Field: The Why, What, and How

This article presents a state-of-the-art power management system (PMS) that was safely commissioned for an energy corporation at its central California oil field. This field consists of several reclosers dispersed over a wide geographic area. The electrical power requirements of the plant are met by three cogeneration plants, comprising eight generators with a total installed capacity of around 25 MW and one utility tie-line connection. In the event of a disruptive blackout, the consequent downtime results in the loss of critical production and revenue, which necessitates a solution involving a smart and high-speed PMS. The PMS solution consists of load-shedding schemes that are contingency based, underfrequency based, progressive based, and wireless radio based. The solution also includes systems for supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), automatic generation control (AGC), voltage control, islanding control, tie-line control, and advanced automatic synchronization. Additionally, there is a high-speed generation-shedding system (GSS) that sheds excess generation to prevent generators from dropping under the environmental (NO
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) emissions limit of minimum generation threshold per unit. This PMS has been commissioned successfully, without any unintended operations (UOs), and has been in service since September 2019.