Emerson Automation Experts: Recent Episodes
Emerson Team
We unpack what the NERC CIP-015-01 standard requires, the compliance timelines utilities must plan for, and the practical challenges of deploying monitoring inside operational technology environments.
Valve failures in mining drive unplanned downtime, safety hazards, environmental exposure, and lost production. Abrasive slurries, cavitation, and corrosive acids each attack valves in different ways, yet all lead to the same outcome: shortened service life and rising maintenance costs. A podcast analyzing available solutions.
s podcast conversation with Emerson’s Knut Riegel explores what “proximity to the customer” looks like in practice, and which leading indicators signal a healthy service ecosystem.
Innovation does not just happen among the primary automation suppliers. Innovative ideas need nurturing and time to prove their value. Companies like Emerson can help provide capital and expertise to nurture these innovations happening in these early-stage companies. This is where Emerson Ventures comes in.
Competitiveness requires the ability to offset higher energy costs and additional regulatory requirements on the path to Net-Zero. Valve selection and lifecycle management play a significant role in operating these production processes with higher availability, greater reliability, and lower emissions.
Valves play an essential role in the cooling requirements for these high-performance data center servers. Reliability and efficiency are required to drive down operating costs throughout the facility’s lifecycle.
Manuel Arroyo and Stan Calame join Jim Cahill to discuss a new white paper, "Mitigating Emissions from Wellhead to Custody Transfer," to highlight technologies and solutions that help oil & gas producers drive emissions reductions and improve sustainability.
Emerson’s Ashwin Kannan joins podcast host Jim Cahill to discuss the requirements for ball valves in polyethylene & polypropylene powder discharge system applications, focusing on achieving tight sealing and ensuring long service life.
Emerson’s Jordan Johnson & Rachel Wright join Jim Cahill in this podcast to discuss challenges in the Life Sciences sector and the role of Emerson Life Savers serve in collaborating closely with them to address and overcome these challenges.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Andrea Sutti joins Jim Cahill to discuss the advantages of triple offset valve technology and why it continues to find homes in an increasing number of applications due to its capital expenditure and operational benefits.
Duncan Schleiss led the product management & development of the DeltaV control system from its inception to its industry leadership. Duncan joins a host of luminaries in automation that have advanced the technologies and solutions to drive greater performance in safety, efficiency, reliability, and profitability for manufacturers and producers.
Emerson’s Nikki Bishop and Franz Valmonte join podcast host Jim Cahill to discuss innovations in DeltaV Edge 2.0 to help pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturers reduce time to market and release times for the medicines and therapeutics they deliver to the world.
In this podcast, Emerson’s Steve Brewer joins me to discuss some of the challenges in addressing these requirements and the role of valve technology in operating successfully.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Hamza Malik joins Jim Cahill to share a solution to silos of data, to bring them together to turn data into actionable information in order to drive performance improvements.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Kelda Dinsdale joins me to discuss innovations in multiphase flow measurement with the Roxar 2600 Multiphase Flow Meter and to enable easier setup and installation, and ongoing accuracy.
Emerson’s Andrea Sutti and Massimiliano Franco join Jim Cahill in this Emerson Automation Experts podcast to discuss the role of these critical valves and actuators in the world’s largest LNG project. They share the importance of selecting and testing the actuated valves to meet the requirements of safety, isolation and control applications.
Descubre por qué el control de válvulas es clave en diversas industrias y cómo las nuevas tecnologías están revolucionando este campo. En este episodio, Jaime Alvarado nos presenta innovaciones como Valve Health App, una herramienta avanzada para la medición y monitoreo de válvulas, y analiza su impacto en la eficiencia y sostenibilidad industrial.¡No te lo pierdas! Suscríbete a nuestro canal y mantente actualizado con las últimas tendencias en automatización y tecnología industrial.
Emerson’s Riyaz Ali & Tom Mullins join podcast host Jim Cahill to share the story of an LNG producer and how they applied digitalization in their project design and installation to deliver integrated solutions to improve the project schedule and ongoing operational performance.
In this podcast, Devin Cloud with one of Emerson’s Impact Partners, John H. Carter, and their ControlWorx Premier Service Provider organization, joins podcast host Jim Cahill to discuss one very successful project in the state of Louisiana along the Gulf of Mexico.
En el episodio 52, nos adentramos en el mundo de la medición de caudal no intrusiva y cómo la tecnología de Flexim que hoy forma parte de Emerson, está transformando la manera en que las industrias monitorean y gestionan los fluidos. Nuestro experto, Alvaro Muñoz, comparte cómo esta tecnología, que no requiere cortar ni modificar las tuberías, ofrece una solución precisa, eficiente y segura para una amplia gama de aplicaciones industriales.Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las últimas innovaciones en automatización y tecnología industrial.
En este episodio, exploramos el fascinante mundo de las celdas de flotación en las operaciones mineras, de la mano de nuestro experto Jorge Espinoza. Descubre las principales variables que influyen en este proceso y cómo los instrumentos inteligentes y avanzados aportan en su optimización.A lo largo de la charla, abordamos cómo estas tecnologías nos permiten obtener una visión más integral y precisa de lo que realmente sucede en las celdas de flotación, mejorando así la eficiencia y el rendimiento de las operaciones mineras.No te pierdas este episodio y suscríbete a nuestro canal para estar al tanto de las últimas innovaciones en automatización industrial.
En este episodio, Jorge Espinoza, experto en instrumentación, nos adentra en el fascinante mundo de las Pilas de Lixiviación y las mejores prácticas en medición para estos activos. Exploramos aspectos clave como:•Variables críticas, incluyendo la presión y el caudal.•La relevancia de seleccionar la tecnología de medición adecuada y los materiales ideales para los medidores.•Cómo aprovechar al máximo los protocolos de comunicación, con especial atención a las ventajas de la tecnología inalámbrica.No te pierdas esta conversación llena de insights valiosos. ¡Escucha o mira el episodio completo y suscríbete para mantenerte al tanto de las últimas innovaciones en automatización industrial!
Melissa Lee & Kebra Tynan join Jim Cahill in this podcast to discuss how Emerson is helping Life Sciences manufacturers address drug development lifecycle challenges with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) based workflow management solution.
Reid Youngdahl joins Jim Cahill in this 30-minute podcast to discuss how Emerson helped a major LNG producer overcome key production challenges by implementing Fisher Joule-Thomson (JT) Valves.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Martha Rendon joins Jim Cahill to discuss the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) challenges and solutions around standards compliance for companies in the pipeline transport industry.
Johan Zebib joins Jim Cahill in an Emerson Automation Experts podcast to share how MES addresses many of the challenges for higher quality, and more efficient and reliable production in the pharmaceutical & biopharmaceutical manufacturing industries.
Excellent process control requires accurate measurements, a robust control strategy, and precise final elements such as control valves, actuators and regulators. Measurement instrumentation is an essential consideration.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Emerson’s John van Gorsel joins me to discuss these considerations in pressure and other measurements. Technology advancements have enabled new capabilities and simplified configuration, operation, and ongoing maintenance.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Pressure Measurement and Measurement Instrumentation sections on Emerson.com.
TranscriptJim: Hi, everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. Accurate and reliable pressure measurement is crucial in a broad range of chemical industry applications, and safety is truly a life-or-death issue due to the presence of toxic, flammable, and potentially explosive products.
I’m joined today by Emerson’s John van Gorsel to discuss some of these challenges. John is the product manager for Pressure Solutions in Europe and will share how the latest instrumentation functionality minimizes installation and operating costs and increases reliability, efficiency, and safety in chemical industry applications. Welcome, John.
John: Well, thank you, Jim. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jim: Well, I’m so thankful that you’re here. Well, why don’t we start out by asking you if you can share a bit of your background with our listeners?
John: Yes, my background is electrical engineering and I started working for Emerson in 1986 as an inside sales engineer for the measurement products. I did it for a couple of years. I moved into an outside sales role. And in the early ’90s, I moved into a product support role for various measurement products. It was pressure, temperature, it was wireless, it was level.
The key thing in that period, which I did that for 25 years almost, was helping customers to solve problems. In 2015, I moved to the European role as a product manager for Europe, and now I would almost say I’m still heavily involved in helping customers solving applications and challenges. Now I work with a larger team of technical specialists and product managers in the countries.
Jim: Now here I thought I was a long-timer with Emerson, starting in ’88, but I guess you got me beat there. Can you highlight some of the changes and challenges in the chemical industry?
John: Yes, absolutely. I think at the moment, one of the key things that we see is that the chemical industry is moving towards a life cycle approach. We’ve seen this discussion on the Plastic Soup and the microplastics and the PFAS. We see that chemical companies are now focusing on the full cycle. In their design of chemicals, they take the raw materials into consideration, the energy used, but also the recycling. We see that that poses some challenges on the technology that we have.
And especially, as an example, the recycling that we now see happening, the advanced recycling really pushes the envelope of what we can do with the instrumentation in terms of high temperatures and high pressures and vacuum pressures. That is what we see where the chemical industry already started to spend a lot of effort in energy efficiency, reducing their energy use. We now see that they are moving towards electrification of processes, the use of hydrogen or biomass, geothermal energy, and that all will require new technologies to adapt to those new circumstances.
Now, if I would mention that what I see as the biggest challenge that we see in the chemical industry is defined skilled personnel. This is partly due to the aging of the workforce, the graying of the workforce, but we also see in Europe that in some countries, there’s still a reduced number of people moving into technical studies. The challenge is to get that personnel into the chemical industry.
I probably should mention as well that we still see that there is a little bit of an assumption that working in the chemical industry you get dirty hands and that stops people from going in that direction.
The one thing that chemical customers are doing at the moment, what the chemical industry is doing is making the chemical industry a better place to work by making tasks easier. A very important one. There is, for instance, to make sure that you don’t need to spend too much time inside the actual installation. People don’t always realize that to safely work in a chemical factory you need protection equipment, PPEs. And believe me, I’ve been there when you have to work inside a plant wearing these flame-retardant overalls, safety shoes, safety gloves, safety helmet, mufflers, safety goggles. It’s pretty tough to work under these circumstances.
So if you want to make a chemical plant a better place to work, the one thing you should try is to reduce the time that people actually need to work inside that plant. Now, what we see as a result of that is that we see requests for simpler instrumentation, easier to understand, reducing the time that you need in the plant, in the fields to configure these instruments.
Jim: Well, that sounds like a number of changes and challenges from some of the regulations that are ever evolving to, yes, that demographic challenge of a lot of us reaching the end of our working lives, and technology can play a role in that. So I guess, how does the new technology meet these challenges in chemical processes?
John: Yeah, I want to explain that. I think it’s best to split it up into two categories. On one hand, we added several features and technologies to address specific issues that we know of. And on the other hand, we make the everyday tasks that you need to do with instrumentation easier. If I start with that, the latter, if I start with that making things easier, for instance, on our 3051 series of pressure transmitters, we gave that transmitter an upgrade and now it can have a graphical backlit display.
And this is a big step forward from the legacy segmented display because a graphical display backlit is easier to read under all circumstances, but it also allows us, for instance, to show more information by showing, as an example, the icons that we may know from the NAMUR NE 107. So an icon indicating what the condition of an instrument is. That was never possible on the legacy displays.
In addition, the display also supports multiple languages. So we can set it to Spanish, to German, to Italian. So that is the outside of the instrument. But in the configuration, we also made some improvements in the user interface. One example, there is a lot of pressure transmitters are used for a secondary function. Think of flow, think of level. And to configure an instrument, for instance, for flow, you need to set certain parameters. You need to set the square root function. You need to maybe set the units in cubic meters per hour or liters per second.
To make that easier, we grouped all that information onto a single page. That reduces the risk of making mistakes or forgetting certain parameters, and it makes it much more easy for the person that is configuring the instrument to do this, saving a lot of time.
What also should be mentioned is that we added Bluetooth configuration or Bluetooth communication to the instrument. Bluetooth communication is a short-range communication that allows a maintenance person or an engineer to look at the condition of an instrument, to configure the instrument, to make changes in the configuration without having to physically open the instrument or climb towards the instrument. It reduces the time. It also makes it possible to do maintenance tasks without opening the instrument, so without having to power down the instrument. In general, it reduces the time that people need to be in the plant. It reduces the time that people need to be working at a certain height. That is a big step forward.
In terms of additional functionality to address specific problems, we added some diagnostics to the instrument. Plug line diagnostics is one example, but we also have loop integrity diagnostics. Both of these diagnostics address specific problems that we see in the chemical industry, being the clogging of impulse lines. You’ll lose your measurement because the impulse line is freezing up or clogging with dust. And the power diagnostics monitor the condition of the power supply or the power to the instrument. Faulty wiring, corrosion of terminals, etc., is detected by the diagnostics. And we added guided proof-testing to the instrument that help maintain a safety system.
Jim: Yeah, so that sounds like improvements in the local display there with the backlighting and organizing the tasks people need to do through the user interface and everything, are steps along the way to making it easier for them to work with and addressing the skills challenges that you brought up earlier.
Now, you mentioned proof-testing these instruments, which I know is required when they are deployed in safety instrumented systems or SIS. These can be quite a complicated, laborious, and time-consuming task. Can you elaborate a little more on why this is so?
John: Yes, it’s probably good to explain a little bit on how the instruments are selected or how safety instrumented system is designed. It’s all about the risk that you have in an installation and you try to mitigate or to reduce that risk in the engineering phase or in the design phase by, for instance, changing the hardware of the design, changing the rating of certain components, keeping people away. That all reduces the risk. But there is a certain risk that remains and you need to solve that, you need to mitigate that with a safety function, a safety instrumented function.
Now, the way that the safety works is that based on the level of risk that the process has, there is a certain requirement for the safety function. We allow the safety function to fail a certain amount of times and you have to think then that when you have a certain risk from the process, we allow the safety function to fail once every 10,000 years. So that is a little bit of what you should think about. But that is based on the reliability of the components that you use in that safety function.
Now, when you design that safety function, you can look up all those failure rates from the instruments and you have the failure rate at that day. But how can you maintain that failure rate? How can you know that after a year in bad weather and changing conditions and a vibrating environment etc., that it still has the same reliability and that there are no hidden errors somewhere in that system? And that is why you need to do proof-testing on the instruments.
If you do a proof test, what you actually do is you test the instrument for hidden failures. And hidden failures are failures that may affect the output of the transmitter, so the functioning of the transmitter, but it’s not detected by the normal safety system. It’s not detected while the instrument is in use. So you do an additional test and that additional test will reveal a certain amount of the possible failures in the instrument.
Now, we as Emerson created the procedures for our instruments and we used a third party to help us with that. So we tell exactly what you need to do to test the instrument. Now, imagine what happens when you have a lot of instruments installed and all these instruments may have a different procedure to do the proof-testing. You need to follow that proof-test that is recommended by the supplier because otherwise, you don’t know how that test will reveal failures.
So we have a documented procedure. And now when you do the proof test on a certain instrument, you have to find that procedure. You need to find the right manual. You need to verify that that manual is actually valid for that revision of the instrument. So we thought, well, this could be easier if we store that information in the instrument or in the device description, the device driver. So now if someone wants to do a proof test or needs to do a proof test, the tool that he or she uses will tell exactly what steps to take.
And when the test is done, where you know exactly that you did the right test, it will also store the result of that test in the form of fail or pass in the transmitter. So you can always see when the test was done and what the result of that test was.
So the 3051 with guided proof-testing saves you a lot of hassle in finding the right documentation. So it reduces the potential errors that you make by using the wrong procedure. So it’s easier to keep your safety system within the tolerable limits.
Jim: Yeah, that sounds like instead of hunting down manuals to see what you need to do with that stored in the instrument, and basically tells you and guides you through the process. Yeah, I can see that being huge time savings when it comes around to proof-testing all those instruments.
Now you had mentioned diagnostics, the built-in diagnostics. I’ve heard some about the changes in diagnostics. So can you tell us some more about this?
John: Yes, absolutely. I think there were several changes that we’ve seen with diagnostics. In the initial versions of instruments, when instruments became smart, the diagnostics were all around the health of the instrument. So the diagnostics would check, is the instrument still working within its parameters? Is it still good, or did it fail?
At a certain moment, we realized that we could do a lot more with the instruments, that we could actually help customers to identify issues with that process rather than only with the instruments. And the current transmitters, the current 3051 that we have has a couple of these diagnostics. So it does have the self-diagnostics that tell you that the instrument is still functioning well.
But it also has what we call process alerts. Process alerts are alerts that an operator or an engineer can set in the instrument completely separate from the primary 4 to 20-milliamp signal. So it’s not interfering with the control loop at all. But you can set some process alerts where you can monitor if the pressure is above or below certain thresholds. And when the pressure comes above that threshold, it writes it in the log. So afterwards, you can look in the instrument and see, hey, I’ve seen that the pressure was five times above the limit that I set or the alert limits that I set where it was below that pressure. So it gives you an opportunity to do some root cause analysis when there is an issue with the installation.
We cannot do this only on the pressure. We can also do that with the temperature sensor that is in the pressure sensor. So we have a pressure or a temperature sensor in there. We use that for compensation. But you can use that as well. And there you can see that maybe the temperature of the transmitter was high for a certain amount of time, or it was low with the risk of freezing of the impulse lines, for instance. So that is an added diagnostics that tell you a little bit about the surroundings of the transmitter rather than the functioning of the transmitter itself.
Some other diagnostics that we have. One was already available for a while in the 3051 series of transmitters is the loop integrity diagnostics. The one critical thing with 4 to 20-milliamp instruments is that the whole loop is a milliamp signal that goes through that loop. And the advantage is that if there is a voltage drop somewhere because of issues in the line or whatever, it doesn’t affect that milliamp signal going in that loop. And that is a big advantage.
Now, the challenge is that when there is too much resistance in that loop, or there is a leak current, at a certain moment, you may see issues with the measurements. A transmitter needs to have a certain voltage at its terminals to operate. Once the voltage is below that limit, which is typically between 10 and 12 volts, when it comes below that minimum voltage, the transmitter will stop working. So you lose your measurements. The diagnostics will tell you well in advance that the voltage is becoming too low. And the voltage becomes lower when there is, for instance, corrosion or moisture in the terminals. So it’s warning for a situation that could potentially make you lose your measurements.
And the second of the advanced diagnostics is the plug line diagnostics. And this is completely new for the 3051. It’s a technology that we already used for something like 15 or 16 years in a different transmitter. And we now have it implemented in the 3051. And what we do, well, if I simplify it, then I would say we use the pressure sensor as a microphone.
And I once made a comparison that I said, “Well, we’re actually mimicking what the older engineers did.” They listened to the process and they said, “Well, hey, I listened and I hear that there is something wrong in the process. There is a valve cavitating,” or, “A pump is losing its bearings.” And we do the same with the pressure sensor. We listen to the noise of the process and that noise of the process will change if something happens in the process.
So there is a certain almost like a fingerprint noise of the process. And when that changes, we know that the impulse lines are clogging, for instance, because that will give a damping on that noise. And it’s a very powerful type of diagnostics because it warns you that you’re about to get a problem with your measurement. But it warns you before the actual problem occurs. So that makes it a very useful addition for situations where there is a risk of clogging and losing the measurement.
Jim: That’s so interesting how technology has advanced where it’s not just looking internally to itself, how are all the components and the transmitter doing, but look externally at the process like some of those examples you gave and the electrical side of things of what you’re doing to power it up, all the things that could spot problems. Maybe the device itself is fine, but there’s issues outside. So that’s very powerful diagnostics there.
John: Yes, it is.
Jim: Now, I know differential pressure level measurement is used in many chemical process applications. What are some of the benefits of using electronic remote sensor-based DP level measurement?
John: Yeah, that’s really a very good question, Jim. And I do need to go back in time a little bit to explain this because this is something that the whole development took decades to happen. Differential pressure transmitters have always been used for level measurements. And the reasons are, it’s simple. Everyone understands how a pressure transmitter works and it’s easy to calibrate, etc. And any liquid in a vertical column, the weight of that liquid will generate the pressure. So when you measure that pressure, you can find out what the level is. So it’s a simple, straightforward measurement with a few exceptions, but it will always work.
Now, there are some measurement challenges, and one of the challenges is when you have a tank that is pressurized, so it’s not connected to the vapor, the vapor space is not connected to the atmosphere, you need to compensate for that pressure that is present in the tank. And the easiest way to do that is you have a pressure transmitter, you mount it to the bottom of the tank and you connect the reference side, the low-pressure side of that pressure transmitter, that differential pressure transmitter, all the way to the top with an impulse pipe and you connect it there.
Now, in some applications that works, but in a lot of applications, what happens there is that you still have some evaporation from the process, it condensates in the impulse line, and over time you get liquid in that impulse line, and that gives you a measurement error. So you need to train it, so that means you have additional maintenance work on that tank.
Then someone very clever came with the idea of what if we already fill up that impulse line so that we already have liquid so we don’t have an issue with the condensation. That works, but you need to make sure that the liquid is always at the same level. So you need to control the level, and that’s also another maintenance task. Someone needs to climb up to the top of the tank and check the level in that impulse line.
And there are some other issues as well, even apart from the fact that making an installation with impulse lines is very expensive because it’s a lot of work. It’s sometimes complicated work too, what you do, you need a specialist to do it. But the fill fluid that was used in those wet lag systems, as we call them, is usually glycol and that’s slightly hygroscopic, so over time it will pollute with water, it changes the density, etc.
The most common solution to all of this is the use of remote seals. A remote seal is a capillary connection, a capillary of a certain length connected to the transmitter, and then an external additional diaphragm. The transmitter is mounted to the bottom of the tank and the capillary runs all the way to the top of the tank and there we connect a reference site. Now, a capillary filled with a certain fluid will create issues when the temperature changes, so that fill fluid will expand, it will contract, it will change the pressure.
One bright idea was what if we have exactly the same capillary on the high and the low-pressure side? Because that will cancel out the effects on both sides. That works to a certain level, but there is still an effect that is called the head effect and that has to do with the vertical distance on the low-pressure side. So if the temperature changes, you still have an effect. And just to give you a number, in a normal-level application, that effect will probably give you a 5% error on the measurement.
And the other thing, and I haven’t even mentioned that, is that when you have a transmitter with two remote seals, and I know a lot of people will recognize this, where a standard transmitter is something like 2, 3 kilograms, one person can pick it up and go into the plant, install it, etc. A transmitter with two remote seals can… First of all, the remote seals are supposed to be flexible, but it’s bendable at most. So it’s really a tough construction. You need two people to carry that. It can be 25 to 35 kilograms depending on the types of remote seals. So you need two people to install it.
Can you imagine how it is if you need to climb up a tank to install such an instrument? So it’s a lot of work. You need a lot of safety measures in addition to what you normally do. You probably need scaffolding.
So we got this question, is there a possibility to do these measurements, but then electronically? So have the two seals so we don’t have the issues with the dry and wet leg systems, but have the measurement at the top of the tank and at the bottom of the tank, but not all the disadvantages of the capillaries. So we designed what we call the Rosemount 3051S Electronic Remote Sensors. So instead of having a capillary, now you have two separate sensors where one is the master, one is the slave, and the master calculates the differential pressure, but we only connect these two sensors with a four-wire electrical connection.
So one person can install it, can install one sensor, run the cable down, connect it to the second sensor at the bottom of the tank, and you have a very accurate measurement not affected by temperature changes. And the main thing is that it’s much, much easier to install with less time needed at height. You don’t need to climb with a very awkward construction. So the electronic remote sensors really solved big problems that we saw in the chemical industry. The applications where we see it, everything of more than 3-meter height there is already an advantage.
Now, think of distillation columns. They can be 30, 40 meters high. If you want to cover that distance with a standard transmitter, with capillaries, capillaries, in reality, you cannot make them longer than 10 meters. That’s more of a practical limit. So you need to find a different solution. When you look at electronic remote sensors, we could put them 100 meters apart if needed. We can have more than 100 meters of electrical cable between the sensors. So we’re not limited at all there. So it’s a big change and it solves a lot of the disadvantages that were traditionally connected to differential pressure level measurements.
Jim: Yeah, it sounds like the installation challenges we’re able to overcome, as well as the accuracy of that electronic connection between the sensors sounds like a great solution for many applications in chemical processes.
Now, I know pressure gauge applications are another thing commonly seen for local visual display within the process. Can you share some of the innovations in this area, such as Rosemount Wireless Pressure Gauges?
John: Yes, I can. The Wireless Pressure Gauge, it all started with customers coming to us and explaining some of the challenges that they saw with gauges. A gauge is usually a mechanical device and it’s based on what is called a Bourdon tube. And a Bourdon tube is really a hollow tube, elliptical tube, slightly bent. And when you pressure on it, then it will stretch and that movement is used to drive a needle on the dial.
And the big advantage there is that it’s a mechanical device. And so it gets damaged pretty easy. It is not protected against overpressure. Now, the big risk that customers also see is that when there is a leak, that Bourdon tube… So the process is behind the dial, meaning that the operator that is looking at the dial of a mechanical pressure gauge is almost looking at the process.
So right behind the dial is the process pressure. So whenever you have a risk of these gauges failing, then you need to take other measures to protect the gauge by adding a remote seal, for instance. By the way, all the mechanical gauges have a plug on the backside that if there is a pressure buildup, that it can blow in the opposite direction away from the operator.
So gauges fail quite often. Metal fatigue, they’re not very good in dealing with overpressure. They’re not very good in dealing with vibration, for instance. And the one thing that I remembered is that customer was really concerned. He said, “Well, if that gauge says 0, and I want to do an operation, I want to start a pump, gauge says 0, how do I know if it’s really 0, if there’s really no pressure or that gauge failed?”
And when we heard that, we thought, “Well, we need to design something else. We need to go back to the drawing board and not try to make a better gauge but use a different design.” So we started with a pressure sensor, the one that we already know because a lot of what we do is based on pressure sensors. And we made the gauge electronic and electronic in a way that it’s battery-powered but it will work for 10 years or more. Because we use a separate pressure sensor, it’s protected against overpressure because this pressure sensor that we use can deal with up to 150 times the pressure that is present in the process. So there’s no risk of leakages or an overpressure incident.
The other thing that we solved with this solution to pressure gauge application is that the dial that we have, the needle that we have is driven by a stepper motor. When you see a traditional gauge on a vibrating application, you see that needle moving up and down and it’s just a gray area where that needle is somewhere. When you see the gauge that we have, the needle is perfectly still indicating the right pressure. And if there is a failure, you will see it because there is an LED indicating the condition of the instrument. So we solved a number of the big problems that customers have.
And in addition, we added the WirelessHART communication to the Wireless Pressure Gauge. So that gives an additional possibility of reading both the measured value, but also the condition of that gauge in a central location. Or you can use it to strengthen a network if it’s already there.
Jim: Well, that sounds like it solves issues around potential safety problems. And then adding the WirelessHART component, you’d be able to get that remote reading in addition to the local one you’d get through the display there. So that’s really, I think, valuable for a lot of the applications there.
Well, John, this has been a really great discussion. Can you kind of summarize for our listeners some of the key takeaways from our conversation?
John: Yes, I can try to do that. So we heard that the chemical industry has several challenges and these challenges are all around, how do I keep my plant safe? And how can I reduce the amount of time and effort that is needed to keep a plant safe? And we also heard that the chemical industry is sometimes struggling with the complexity of instruments and they need simpler instruments that are more user-friendly. And we designed and improved some of our instruments to address specifically these challenges that the chemical industry have. And we also have some advanced solutions like the Wireless Pressure Gauge and electronic remote sensors that address specific challenges that exist in the chemical industry.
Jim: That’s a great summary of things. And I guess to close things out, where can our listeners go to learn more about some of these things we’ve discussed?
John: Well, I would suggest to use our website, emerson.com. And you could even use rosemount.com, and you can use the search function for 3051, and it takes you to multiple pages with information, including an interactive 3D animation of the instrument where you can test all the features that it has. Or you can search for the 3051S ERS or Wireless Pressure Gauge to go to the respective pages of these products. And you’ll find a lot of information, documentation, manuals, user experience with these technologies, information about applications, etc.
Jim: And I know for some of the things that you mentioned along the way, I’ll add hyperlinks in the transcript, make it easier to get to some of those. Well, John, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with our listeners today.
John: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Jim.
-End of transcript-
The technology transfer process for manufacturers in the Life Sciences industry has been traditionally a slow and cumbersome process to scale up from research and development to commercial production. Capturing the process knowledge along the way and making changes can slow down the overall process.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Bob Lenich joins me to discuss how the Process Knowledge Management (PKM) digital collaboration platform can help streamline the process and minimize errors, resulting in faster time-to-market.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the DeltaV Process Knowledge Management section on Emerson.com for more on how to drive performance improvements across your pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical development lifecycle.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone, I’m Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Digital technology transfer is a growing opportunity to reduce time to market for new therapies. The current approach for developing and transferring a manufacturing process to different product lines across the globe is difficult. The development phase within a global supply chain is very cumbersome, inefficient, and time-consuming. I’m joined here today by Bob Lenich, business director for Emerson’s Process Knowledge Management digital collaboration platform to discuss what is being done to improve this key activity and reduce time to market. Welcome Bob.
Bob: Hey Jim, happy to be here.
Jim: Well, I’m glad that you’re here to share some of your knowledge with our listeners. So Bob, I’ve been around here at Emerson a very long time and I know you have too. Can you share a little bit about your background with our listeners?
Bob: Sure, I hate to talk about how long it’s been because it has been a while but I’ve been at Emerson for several decades and most of that has been in the Life Sciences, process management and operations space. I’ve worked on projects, I’ve worked in product development, I’ve worked in marketing and consulting and again I have a really broad background in all things related to Life Sciences, manufacturing, operations, and overall supply chain.
I’m very excited about understanding both the opportunities that are coming and what Emerson can do to help make those get realized, especially given everything that’s going on in Life Sciences right now because it is such a dynamic space and a lot of the things that we’re talking about doing are really important to just help the industry get better and better.
Jim: Well, that sounds like a wealth of background that you bring to our conversation today. So let’s dive into it. What is driving this change in, I guess, digitizing tech transfer? What is the technology transfer and what are the problems today?
Bob: Sure, so the idea is today there are just a growing number of new therapies being developed. Some of the more recent data we have shows that there are more than 40,000 clinical trials currently underway here in 2024. And so in order for a development to happen, it starts in early stage, it goes to later stage development, it goes to clinical, then it goes to commercial assuming it’s successful. As you’re going through each of those phases of development, someone has to define here’s how we want to make this particular thing and then as it moves from phase to phase, until the next phase, okay, here’s the next thing that we want to do. So capturing all of the information, defining all of those things and making sure that what was done in an early stage is effectively passed on to a subsequent stage and that what’s done in that is captured and continued to be passed on is the opportunity that’s in front of us.
Today, doing things in an individual stage can represent thousands of parameters, and parameters include things like equipment definition and specification for capabilities, material information, operating parameters, quality parameters, just all kinds of things around that. And so if you say, great, there’s 40,000 clinical trials happening, there are thousands of pieces of information to manage around each of these, you’re going to go through multiple phases. You can just see the growth in terms of the amount of information to be managed and how to do that.
Today, all of that is typically done through a paper process or spreadsheets or things like that, which works because it reflects how things have been done in the past, but it’s really not very effective. And so the challenge is people want to accelerate what they’re doing. They have a large and growing volume of all of this and they really would like to apply technology to start doing it. There are two other things that have kind of really impacted this. One, during COVID, everybody saw that if you throw lots of people and bodies at things, you could actually get things done much more quickly. I mean, everybody saw that vaccines were developed in 18 months versus what normally takes 10 years. But again, that was because they threw lots of people at it.
Also, there have been some incentive changes like recent laws in the U.S. with things like the Inflation Reduction Act have also combined to reduce the amount of time patents are in play for development that’s done. So the combination of all of these new things coming, the fact that regulatory groups are reducing the amount of time you’ve got patent protection, and everybody needs to do this. But managing all this information is becoming more and more challenging as the number of these things grow, says that we really need to figure out how to apply technology to this process to make it more efficient and effective.
Jim: Wow, my brain hurts from that 40,000 times 10,000s per each of these in there. That’s really a lot of information to manage, I guess, especially with all the compliance and validation requirements in the industry. So I guess what tools or procedures exist today for this?
Bob: Right. And today, like I was saying earlier, this is kind of a, it reflects the way things have historically been done, which is a combination of people and paper. Traditionally, it’s a paper thing. You know, I mean, you basically have to write things down in documents, create reports, people sign those reports, and then they manage those documents through a paper process. Today, a lot of that has been, you know, kind of converted from paper to paper on glass, but it’s still very much a paper process. And the thought here is, is that just because it’s in a digital document and it’s digitally available doesn’t mean that all of the information in that particular report is easily available because getting information out of a Word document can be challenging. Getting information out of a spreadsheet can be challenging.
And just to give you a quick example, even though things are digital today, today, when someone is working on a spreadsheet to characterize, you know, how to make something or how to scale a piece of processing equipment up, a scientist will sit in and they’ll start working on their calculations and they’ll start typing it in. And when they figure it out in order to meet the regulatory and validation requirements, a second person has to sit with them and verify that they typed in the calculation correctly and sign off on the fact that, oh yeah, you typed it correctly. Guess what? That’s the kind of thing that, well, that’s not what those people originally went to their, you know, they got their degrees in to watch somebody else type in Excel. So if there are things that we can do to eliminate that kind of a step, it’s a huge savings to those people because it gets them away from the tedium of just managing the process to actually doing the kind of work that they want.
And then by the same token, when you take it from site one to site two and you go from early stage to late stage to clinical, every time you do a transfer, two people have to get involved in that exact same kind of a process. The source site has to say, here’s what we did. The destination site says, okay, we got it. Here’s how we’re updating it. Everybody signs off on that. And so again, just the tedium of managing the exchange, setting up the meetings to do that, making sure that people are available, you know, all of those kinds of things, just make it a real headache to try and do it with, you know, today’s typical tools.
Once you have those things, even though you do then have those documents in like a Word document or a spreadsheet, those are typically then managed on SharePoint. And again, SharePoint has a lot of benefits in terms of making it easily available. But finding stuff on SharePoint is a real headache. And if you’re trying to find a particular parameter in a particular file on SharePoint and you want to find out, oh, where was that pH value referenced in five different places across five different SharePoint sites, again, that’s a major headache to try and go in and do it. So while things work today, they don’t work very efficiently and effective today. And so there’s a lot of opportunity to go in and start converting them.
So what we’re really talking about doing is trying to take what had been this, you know, traditionally paper process, even though it’s somewhat digital, and convert it from a paper process to more of a data process. So instead of having a report or a spreadsheet, all of the elements that are going into that document or into that spreadsheet are now pieces of data that we want to manage independently through some kind of a centralized application. And then we want to do collaboration, change management and things around that so that you’re converting it from the way you’ve done things to something that takes advantage of new technology.
Jim: Yeah, I think you describe that challenge really well that, you know, one step is just another from pieces of paper to really pieces of paper behind a computer monitor, which is a step in the right direction. But it certainly doesn’t give you the benefit of what could be possible. So I guess what are some of the new approaches to replace and improve this traditional approach?
Bob: Sure. So one of the things that’s out there is this idea of digital process knowledge management is a growing opportunity and there are growing solutions out there. So about three years ago, three, four years ago, we had been working in this space and we were trying to figure out good ways of doing that. There was a company out there called Fluxa. They had a package called Process Knowledge Management. Emerson did an acquisition of that company and we’ve been working now to embed that product platform into the overall Emerson portfolio.
The idea here again is that instead of having SharePoint that’s managing all these individual documents and spreadsheets and things, what we’re doing is we’re extracting the information out of those sources. We’re putting that into an enterprise-wide database application so that all of those things are available, changeable, traceable, etc. so that you can do your job much more effectively. And so the thought here is that particularly when you’re defining a process, a manufacturing process, and you need to say things like, okay, what are the step sequences that are required in order to go through and make this? What are all the associated operating parameters and then attributes around that? If it’s a pH for making sure that the bioreactor is operating at the right level for growth, what’s the appropriate operating range? What’s the appropriate calibration range? Just making sure you’ve got all of those things captured.
Similarly, when we talk about the equipment and that bioreactor, what are the characteristics and capabilities of that bioreactor or other things in the process so that you can really say, yep, I’ve got a good understanding of how that piece of equipment is going to work. And then as I go from stage or phase-to-phase and development line to development line, I can confirm that, yep, I know that the new piece of equipment I’m going to use reflects what the original one had and therefore we can confirm that, yep, it’s going to work and you’re going to get the same kind of result.
So this idea of converting all of this information from something that was captured in a spreadsheet or a document, making each of those things an individual element, an individual recipe object is one of the first things that happens in PKM. And the key thought there is that when you have all of those things broken down into this level, then you can provide traceability and versioning and automation. So the thought here is that when somebody then says, great, we define the pH value, but you know what, we found out after running some tests that instead of running at 3.7, we want to run at 3.9. And great, you’ve got to go through and do change management. Doing that, again, in SharePoint with spreadsheets is a real headache. With something like PKM though, you make the change in one place and then every place that particular value is referenced is automatically updated. So that’s again taking advantage of the propagation characteristics of new technology and taking advantage of this new model.
Similarly, once you start combining things together and you’ve got all those building blocks in, then you can start building things like templates to say, okay, let’s define how a bioreactor works. What are the key operating activities, key step sequences, and then all of the associated parameters with that so that you’ve got a standard approach to say, you know, this is how bioreactors generally work. And then you can customize that for each individual product that you do.
So having this template then gives you the ability to be much more efficient. And then again, as people make changes to the template, any place that template was used, you can reference that, you can propagate the updates, and you can ensure that any changes are done are appropriately reflected everywhere it was used. And you have confidence because you’re using digital technology to track all of that versioning, all of the updates and everything else.
Then once you’ve got the building blocks done, then you can start writing recipes. And there has historically been something called ISA88. ISA88 is a standard that the industry has adopted for a number of years. And what it really does, it talks about having general recipes, which are scale agnostic, but kind of defined in general how things work. They will have site recipes, which are more specific and are starting to getting very scale-specific, as in instead of it being a benchtop scale at a five-liter bioreactor versus a commercial scale at a 20,000-liter bioreactor, you’re getting into those kind of distinctions. And then you go to master recipes and control recipes.
So what we’ve done with PKM is we’ve historically never really been able to do the general and site recipes in a very efficient manner. So PKM really focuses on those things. And then what it allows you to do is once you’ve got general and site recipes defined, you can then very easily export that information and integrate it with the execution systems that do the master recipes and the control recipes to actually do things. So this combination of defining things across the full scope of a recipe hierarchy and then being able to integrate things is another one of the major elements that you have and that you can do.
And then the last part is that when you look at all of this, you also want to be able to go through and do risk assessments, because again, it’s great to be able to say, here’s the definition of everything and here’s how it should work. But in order to ensure that the pharmaceutical manufacturing is meeting all of the safety requirements that are out there, then you want to be able to say, great, what are all the key risk areas at each stage against each piece of equipment, against each parameter that I’m talking about, and be able to again capture that and go, Okay, yep, this is a real significant risk. Let’s identify that. Let’s identify how we’re going to deal with that and turn that into something that we’re going to actually manage. And so, again, capturing that definition, capturing that information, and then being able to reference that as you’re actually doing things to address those risks is something that’s captured by PKM.
So a lot of stuff there. It’s a really powerful package and it really takes advantage of new technology so that you’ve got everything in a centralized database. And then you can have multiple people work on common areas, you know, collectively. They don’t have to be in the same time zone. They don’t have to be in the same location. They can see changes that are done. You can add comments and annotations. You know, you can have chats back and forth. There are just a lot of things that make this a much more effective way of taking advantage of digital technologies for people to share information about how to do something.
Jim: Yeah, it sounds like it’s not just organizing it better in the database and make an update here reflects in the places where it needs to reflect is that collaborative element of people being able to work and seeing what each other’s doing that’s really able to foster that. So, Bob, can you share some details like where this has been done or what kind of results and benefits that have been achieved so far?
Bob: Sure. Like I said, this is a really growing opportunity and a number of leading-edge life science companies are actually applying this and have been doing this for a number of years. So it’s really interesting what they’ve been able to accomplish.
The first thing that’s done is that they’ve been able to go through a standardization exercise. One of the things that companies have found is that when they’ve started out, they’ve had a lot of differences that are minor differences, and they’ve always kind of agreed, Okay, the way we do it in site one versus site two, they’re close, but they’re not identical. And that’s okay. And we’re not saying you need to make them identical. But what’s been interesting is when you start with this combination of general and site recipe approach, getting some kind of common naming convention and standardization really provides a lot of benefits because it helps you eliminate redundancies and it makes communications much clearer, both within your organization and then when you actually talk to the regulatory groups.
So when you’re doing a regulatory submission for a filing for a new indication, for a new therapy, having common names for things so that people understand and realize, oh, yeah, I called it bioreactor and I called it titre. And exactly what that means and knowing that it’s the same thing across different sites that you have in different products that you’re talking about is a really valuable thing that those people that they didn’t necessarily realize when they started, but it’s become something that’s very evident as they’ve been using it. And again, the thought here is that people were doing the same things, but they were calling it slightly differently. And so aligning on that is a really big benefit.
The second thing that’s been going on is that the opportunity to start doing this and then be able to really reduce the amount of time, because when you look at what we’re talking about here and what I talked earlier about saying, you know, people are using spreadsheets and they’ve got two people typing in a spreadsheet and you’ve got people reviewing it and you’ve got to transfer it over to another group. They’ve got to do more typing, then when you connect it to an automation system, somebody’s got to extract the information on the spreadsheet, you know, put it into an automation system. Somebody’s got to verify they did that correctly. You’ve got to go through all this testing. There’s just a whole bunch of data integration and management activities that don’t provide a lot of value add but you have to do just because today all of those separate systems have to work together in order to make this happen.
So as a great example, Roche recently won facility of the year in 2023 for their clinical supply chain facility in San Francisco. And it’s one of the best applications of taking advantage of Process Knowledge Management and connecting that into execution systems. And so the idea here is that they’ve established, you know, “general recipes.” So they have process families defined for general classifications of things like monoclonal antibodies or other things like that. And they have a general way of approaching those. Then when they’re doing an individual product, they will define that product. And as they’re going from, you know, an initial site for development to a launch site to a full-blown commercial site, they will have site versions of that one general recipe for that particular product. And they’ll be able to automatically scale things.
So the fact that you can take advantage of the information, you can embed calculations that they refer to the scale of the site and automatically scale things up so that if you’re at a 2K site versus a 20K site, you know, the calculations for how to size something, how to, you know, figure out the amount of materials that you need, things like that, those kind of things can automatically be done and then tracked as a part of what you’re doing. So Roche has embedded that. They’ve also integrated it with a lot of their existing systems. So they’ve tied their knowledge management system into their materials system. So they know that the standardized material names and suppliers that exist in their overall enterprise planning system are the ones that are being referenced by the scientists. So, again, nobody’s having to go through and cross check those kind of things.
So the idea that this information that’s required from material definitions, to equipment characterizations, to telling the automation system what to do, all of those things are connected together and integrated. And the real benefit of that is one, they’re able to do things on a much faster basis. And Roche will tell you they have been able to dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort it takes them to create a new product. And in the clinical supply center, they have their digital knowledge management system integrated with their execution systems. And they will tell you that they have eliminated the need for transcriptions, you know, so that people are not involved at all in moving something from system one to system two, because it’s all integrated. Therefore, all the transcription errors have gone away. All of the work to review that, sign off on that, have gone away. And they will clearly document that they have been able to save significant amounts of calendar time, significant amount of costs as they’re going through and doing this. And this is now a core part of what they’re doing at that facility. And they have certainly been working to extend that to other words.
So the real plus here is that you can significantly reduce the amount of calendar time that historically is taken to go, you know, from site one to site two or to go from version one to version two, eliminating a lot of the testing, you know, verification, confirming that there aren’t any errors, things like that because you’re doing all of this with digital integration and you’re able to confirm that, you know, that the thing’s transferred correctly and you’ve got the traceability, you’ve got the data integrity, you’ve got all of the elements around that. It just significantly reduces the amount of time and effort that it takes.
It does take a chunk of work. You do have to have done this standardization exercise up front. You do have to have worked to make the integration there. And so what we’re also working on is making it so that eliminating those kind of barriers, making it easier to start, making it easier to do the integration so that you can get to this end result, dramatically reducing the amount of calendar time and or effort it takes to bring in a new product to a new facility. Those are things that are coming. But at the moment, you can certainly go out and look and there are a number of papers that are out there, presentations that have been done that just kind of document it. And like I said, that facility of the year award from ISPE for 2023 is one of the best ones we’ve seen.
Jim: You can just see that the workflow, the whole process getting way more efficient and way less errors involved. And I liked what you said at the start about, you know, kind of bringing that common tribal language between facilities all across the world. You know, everyone’s doing things a little bit differently. This will get away from that. So it’s really common language of communication, which is really a huge benefit, I think. So where can a life sciences manufacturer get started to learn more about the Process Knowledge Management solution?
Bob: You know, there’s some really good places to go. I mean, obviously, we’ve got a lot of information on the Emerson websites. If you go to Emerson and you start searching for Process Knowledge Management, it’ll take you to the websites on the Emerson portals where we have what we’re doing and examples of what have been done there. And again, you can see videos of things people have done. We can show you the kind of capabilities that we have. And obviously, we are ready to talk to you about anything else we can do to help you understand things and potentially start showing you and give you demonstrations of this.
The other places you can go, hopefully, people in the life science world are familiar with Bioforum. Bioforum is an industry consortia that consists of a large number of end users, technology providers like Emerson, equipment providers like, you know, Cytiva and Sartorius, regulatory groups, academic groups, etc. And, you know, we work collaboratively together to start kind of capture what the industry needs. And we do this in a I’ll say an agnostic perspective so that we’re capturing the needs, but we’re not doing anything that’s proprietary there. And if you go to the Bioforum site, you can also get a lot of good information about what’s going on relative to tech transfer and more of the general things that are happening. But if you want to start looking at specific examples and how to start targeting it and make it real for you, then I would say you need to talk to someone like us that’s actually working and doing it with people. But you need both. You need to understand here’s in general what’s coming and how it’s being looked at by both the industry, the regulatory groups, etc. And then you can look at here are places to go to show you specific examples and the real benefits that have been achieved.
Jim: Yeah, and I know we’ve covered a number of things in the Bioforum that they’ve put out in separate blog posts. And I’ll provide a [Biophorum] link to where we have some of those located here on the blog and some of the other things that you mentioned. So, yeah, there’s a whole lot of information and videos and other documents to learn more or connect with the experts that we have around the world. So, Bob, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise with our listeners.
Bob: Happy to do so. Again, this is a really exciting time in Life Sciences because making these kind of changes is something that everybody’s been interested in for a long time. And the reality is it’s happening now and people are really excited about actually making these kinds of things real and then getting the benefits from, it is a really exciting place to be. Thank you.
-End of transcript-
En este episodio la experta Darianyela Cedeño, nos instruye sobre la importancia de las colectoras de polvo en las diferentes industrias y nos comparte nuevas tecnologías de automatización para estos activos, que ayudan a maximizar su eficiencia y minimizar su impacto medioambiental.
Te invitamos a ver o escuchar el episodio completo y suscribirte a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre innovaciones en automatización industrial.
Personalized healthcare, time-to-market pressures, and accurate, timely data collection and dissemination are all significant trends for manufacturers in the Life Sciences industry. Knowing that digital transformation efforts are required is one thing, but determining how best to proceed is another.
In this podcast, Bill Carey joins me to discuss the Life Sciences Showroom facility in the Austin, Texas area. The showroom demonstrates how to address the challenges in developing a path forward. He discusses how technology has simplified tech transfer processes and how real-time data collection and predictive diagnostics can keep production on track to avoid delays caused by rework and information gathering.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Life Sciences & Medical section on Emerson.com for more on the technology and solutions to help drive improved performance and stay ahead of the trends.
TranscriptJim: Hi, everybody, this is Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Emerson is helping our customers accelerate the personalized healthcare revolution and facilitate the end of treatable disease-caused deaths in our lifetime. In this podcast, I’m joined by Emerson’s Bill Carey to discuss the acceleration of technology adoption with demonstrable manufacturing operations management solutions. We’ll talk about the evolution of Emerson Life Sciences’ digital ecosystem with innovative technology. Welcome to the podcast, Bill.
Bill: Thanks, Jim. Great to be here.
Jim: Well, it’s great that you’re here sharing your expertise with our listeners. Bill, I moved over from the other Austin area Texas office building, the building you’re in to make room for the Austin Life Sciences showroom. Can you share with our listeners what’s available in that space?
Bill: Yeah, the Austin Life Sciences showroom, it’s a new space that we just built out in the Emerson Innovation Center in Round Rock, Texas. So here we’re able to show off our standardized Emerson Life Sciences digital ecosystem. And this space is now another example that highlights Emerson’s commitment to the life sciences industry. We built this beautiful glass-enclosed conference room with two connected clean room demonstration labs.
Jim: Yeah, it’s really a sight to see over there really beautifully how it all came together. So I guess why is it important for customers to be able to see the depth and breadth of this digital ecosystem?
Bill: Emerson’s here to help our customers realize significant tangible benefits like faster new product introductions, shorter lead times, improved quality and maximizing productivity. But seeing is believing. So by showcasing the Emerson Life Sciences digital ecosystem, we expect to accelerate technology adoption with demonstrable manufacturing operations management solutions. Also, we’re propagating best practices, we’re using current technology and by having the audience’s initial impressions, be a view of an interconnected ecosystem.
Jim: That’s right. It’s one thing, I guess, to talk about it, but it’s a whole other thing to really see some of this in action. So with, you know, that seeing is really believing what’s happening, can you tell us about some of the demonstrations available today?
Bill: Yeah. So as I mentioned, we have two labs. In our lab number two, we demonstrate a one-click tech transfer to scale up a benchtop process to clinical or commercial production. It’s built around a cell culture process for traditional biotech. So we’ve been presenting this demo to customers since January. But of course, we’re continually adding new capabilities. So when we finalize the equipment going into lab one, we’re currently intending to build out a demo also demonstrating one-click tech transfer. But in this case, a scale-out from a process from one to many production lines. And the intention there is to base it on a CAR-T process for advanced therapy medicinal products, or ATMP.
Jim: Yeah, I think that scale up process is the thing that can really shrink the timelines between discovery and usable therapeutics and medicine for our customer. So it’s interesting that you are integrating Emerson software solutions with the physical equipment that our customers would actually use. Can you tell us how you choose what gets included in the showroom?
Bill: We’ve been working with some companies in our OEM partner program. So ideally, the equipment is given to us on a loan or on consignment basis, maybe for two to three years. And then we’ll periodically refresh them to just have everything stay evergreen. So we’re always talking about some of the latest equipment. So far, we’ve been able to utilize OEM partners, DeltaV-specific libraries and graphics. And currently we have an Aplicon three-liter bioreactor, a Thermo Fisher Rotea centrifuge, Kaizen Raman for spectral PAT and a biostat STR 50-liter bioreactor from Sartorius.
Jim: Wow, it sounds like we can begin manufacturing some things there with all that equipment in there. That’s very impressive.
Bill: Yeah, we’ve been talking if we could do any of that after hours.
Jim: Now, that would be fun. So what Emerson products are you currently highlighting in the showroom?
Bill: So we’ve pulled a bunch of things from our DeltaV platform. So we have DeltaV DCS, DeltaV MES–manufacturing execution systems, DeltaV real-time scheduling, DeltaV process specification management with spectral PAT. We’re using both Simca and AspenTech models and our latest offering of DeltaV workflow management.
Jim: And for listeners, there’ll be a transcript that comes along with the podcast and I’ll make sure to add hyperlinks to all of those solutions and products Bill just mentioned there. You mentioned you’re always adding new capability. Can you give us a sneak peek of some coming attractions?
Bill: Well, I’d like to be able to show more about where contextual data is and being able to do monitoring, analysis and reporting on it. So to serve that, I intend to add DeltaV Edge, InMation and Seeq.
Jim: Wow, that the management of data has always historically been one of the huge challenges. So that should be some exciting additions once you have all that in place. So I guess when you’re speaking with customers who come in to the facility, what are some of the key challenges that you hear about from them?
Bill: Well, most often is needing to take advantage of all the data that’s been collected from the islands of automation. And customers want to move forward on their digitalization journey toward a predictive or adaptive plan. But of course, then there’s also the startups to come in that are just working on their first batch records and they need help deciding what even to automate.
Jim: Yeah, I can see that full side that that data is everything. And as we move forward and technology collects more and more data everywhere, managing that, making sense of it, and getting it to provide useful information back that’s actionable is really important. So I guess just as we wind things down a little bit, if a team from one of the life sciences company wants to come visit us, how should they go about getting a visit scheduled?
Bill: They should reach out to their local Emerson business development team. That could be Emerson or an Emerson Impact Partner. From there, we’re going to follow the same process we’ve been using for years when we have folks visiting our IOP [Integrated Operations] Center here in Austin.
Jim: Well, that sounds easy enough. Reach out to one of our Impact partners or people, you know, within the Emerson organization and come here to Austin to check it out. Well, Bill, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and discussing what’s available in our Austin Life Sciences showroom. Thanks a lot.
Bill: Thanks for having me. It’s exciting talking about this new space and getting more folks in here to see it.
-End of transcript-
Manufacturers and producers across all industries know the challenges in keeping their operations cyber-secure. Industries such as pipeline transportation and electrical & gas distribution networks face additional challenges in the wide geographic spread of their operations and the need for reliance on public communications networks.
In this podcast, I’m joined by Emerson cybersecurity expert Steve Hill to discuss these additional challenges and ways the companies in these industries, suppliers, and federal regulators are collaborating to develop and implement best practices for strong cyber resiliency.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the SCADA Solutions & Software for Energy Logistics on Emerson.com and the AspenTech Digital Grid Management page for methods and solutions to improve your cybersecurity defenses and ongoing programs.
TranscriptJim: Hi, everyone. This is Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. Pipelines cover a wide geographic area and require continuous monitoring for safe, efficient, and reliable operations. Today, I’m joined by Steve Hill to discuss the challenges pipeline operators face in keeping their pipeline networks cybersecure. Welcome to the podcast, Steve.
Steve: Thanks, Jim. Pleasure to be here.
Jim: Well, it’s great to have you. I guess, let’s get started by asking you to share your background and path to your current role here with us at Emerson.
Steve: Thanks, yeah. I’ve been in the automation and SCADA industry for about 40 years, started on the hardware design and communications that then moved over to software. And it’s nearly 20 years I’ve been with Emerson. I joined as part of the Bristol Babcock acquisition. My main focus now is working in wide-area SCADA as the director of SCADA Solutions for Emerson, and most of that’s working in the oil and gas industry, working with Emerson sales and the engineering teams and our customers as they design systems and products for the industry.
And also, alongside that, for the last few years, I’ve been collaborating with CISA. That’s the U.S. government Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as part of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative.
Jim: Okay. That’s a nice, varied background. That’s really good for our discussion. So, what exactly do you mean by wide-area SCADA?
Steve: That’s a great question. There’s a SCADA system where the software is monitoring equipment across a very wide area. It might be a very large geographic area, like a pipeline or gas, or water distribution network, or perhaps a well field. I mean, some of the systems, for example, I was speaking to a customer last week who is monitoring an entire pipeline across Peru, and yet, their control centers are actually in Mexico. So, to do that kind of thing, the equipment is usually connected via public networks. You know, private networks don’t extend that far, and even the control centers may be widely distributed.
And as part of that, compared to in-plant control, there’s an assumption that your communications are clearly not gonna be 100% perfect. You’re gonna lose communications either momentarily, like with cellular networks, and when, for example, like we’ve got in Texas this week, with natural events like hurricanes can cut communications for hours. But because these systems are all critical infrastructure, such as pipelines or electrical distribution, the actual operations, the process, must never be interrupted. Today, we’re talking about cybersecurity, and that same sensitivity is why these systems are now the target to some of the most sophisticated cyberattacks.
Jim: Okay, that gives a picture of the breadth of these types of SCADA systems, and you had mentioned you’d work with CISA, the cybersecurity infrastructure defense agency, and the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, which I’ll just call JCDC for short. Can you give some more examples on that work?
Steve: Yeah. Really, I could give you a bit of background. Probably many of our listeners know that there’s been several successful cyberattacks against critical infrastructure over the last few years. Probably the most famous in the pipeline industry was an attack that’s referred to as the Colonial Pipeline attack. That was actually a criminal ransomware attack that resulted in gasoline and jet fuel shortage across the Eastern U.S. for several days, and that was criminals basically trying to get money. And it was almost a random attack, it wasn’t targeted.
However, there have been actual state-sponsored attacks, and probably the one that was most successful was prior to the Russian military attack against Ukraine. They actually instituted several successful cyberattacks against the Ukrainian power grid. And very concerning is, in recent months, the U.S. infrastructure, including pipelines, have been successfully infiltrated by a group that are called Volt Typhoon, who are thought to be from the People’s Republic of China. So JCDC and CISA are working hard to really counter and protect against these threats.
Jim: Wow. Well, that’s clearly a huge concern. What is the JCDC doing to address these challenges?
Steve: Well, in 2023, so last year, JCDC facilitated the development of something called the Pipeline Reference Architecture. Basically, Emerson, alongside other industry vendors and also pipeline operators, participated in the development of this Pipeline Reference Architecture, which I’ll refer to as the PRA. It’s a fairly short document that outlines the design and operating principles for SCADA systems in the pipeline industry. And one thing the government is keen to point out, it’s not a regulatory document, but it does set out the best principles and is intended as guidance for the industry. Really, they want to work with the industry to come up with best practices.
Jim: Well, it sounds like this PRA is another set of standards to address cybersecurity. Why is another document needed in the industry where a bunch of standards exist now?
Steve: Yeah, that’s a question I and other members get asked quite a lot. The main reason is that wide-area SCADA represents a very different set of challenges to traditional SCADA, which we refer to as inside the wire. So for example, a refinery or a manufacturing plant, everything is in one location. But as I mentioned before, wide-area SCADA has got a very wide displacement, physically. It also actually has a lot of remote field workers. There may be folks working on that system hundreds of miles from base, and you’re also using communications networks that are not even owned or operated by the owners of the pipeline. Though this PRA is really intended for the pipeline industry, clearly, it’s applicable to almost any wide-area SCADA, that’s water or electrical industry as well.
Jim: Okay, that makes sense. So those are definitely challenges that don’t exist for more automation systems, as you say, inside the wire. Tell us more about how the PRA addresses these.
Steve: Well, the big thing is segmentation, basically, taking the network and splitting it into different levels that represent different areas of the operation. For example, the internet would be what’s referred to as level zero, and moving all the way down to the bottom of the network, that’s level nine. And the levels in between that represent different levels of trust. Now, those who are familiar with cybersecurity and SCADA are probably familiar with something that is called the Purdue model, which I think first came out in the late 1980s, and that also splits up SCADA and control networks and actually business networks into different levels. However, when that came out, the internet was in its infancy. No one would ever have used the internet or even really public IP networks for their connectivity. So it doesn’t really take into account many of the things we take for granted today in these systems.
So the PRA is intended to expand and take into account the reality that, for example, some of this critical data will actually be transiting across a public network, right? And in order to achieve that with this segmentation, we’re using a concept called Defense in Depth, right? And as you go down the different levels of the network, the assumption is you can trust each item on that network better. So, for example, on the internet, you don’t trust anything, but when you get down, let’s say, to the communications between an RTU [remote terminal unit] and a gas chromatograph on a local serial link, you might completely trust that. Now, it’s interesting, although that’s part of the PRA model, that does actually conflict with a security concept called Zero Trust, which is something that Emerson has really based our products on. But both zero trust and defense in depth are valid.
Jim: Now, you had mentioned a couple of concepts I’d like to explore a little bit more in there, and let’s start with zero trust. Can you explain that concept to us?
Steve: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Zero trust is a concept where any piece of equipment or software should trust nothing. Don’t trust anything else on the network, don’t trust the network to be safe, and it should not rely on anything else for protection. And historically, SCADA was protected, for example, by firewalls. You would use insecure products that were known to not be secure because they were developed perhaps 20 or 30 years ago and hide them behind firewalls, and that’s really how we’ve handled security today. But there’s a realization you can’t do that. So we now need to design products so that they don’t trust anything.
But the reality is many of our customers, Emerson’s customers and pipeline operators, have devices that were installed perhaps 30 years ago. That’s the typical lifespan of some RTUs and controllers in this industry. So as a result, when you get down to the lower levels of the network, zero trust doesn’t work. So you do have to have levels of additional protection. So for example, if you had a Modbus link, which is basically insecure almost by design, that should be protected by additional levels of firewalls and so on. But if you’re designing a modern product, it should be designed so it doesn’t rely on anything else. And that’s the concept of zero trust.
Jim: Okay, got it. So don’t trust anything. Everything must be proven out. And the other concept you talked about was defense in depth. So, what does that mean?
Steve: Well, the phrase is most commonly used where we’re talking about a network with multiple levels in. So when you come from, for example, the internet into your business network, you would have a set of firewalls and what’s called the demilitarized zone. And then when you go from your business network down to your controls network, you’d have another set of firewalls. So it’s multiple levels of protection. However, that same concept should be used actually within products as well. And, in fact, Emerson takes that very seriously with our secure development lifecycle certifications, IEC 62443, and how we design those products.
Jim: Well, that’s good. As you get those two and as you put in more modern technology, that it complies and has that cybersecurity built into mind there. So, can you give us an example of how it’s built in?
Steve: Yeah. That great one. If I take, for example, the Emerson FB3000 RTU, that’s a flow computer and a controller device that’s designed specifically for the oil and gas industry, especially for pipelines, an obvious concern is that that may be attacked externally to modify the firmware. Now, at the first level, the RTU itself has secure protocols. It uses something called DNP3, which would, in theory, provide access to the device. But then the firmware, when we issue new firmware, we put it on a website so we have protection of the website, we also publish a hash, which is basically a unique key that the customer downloading the firmware can check. It hasn’t been modified by anyone attacking the website. But then, when they actually put it into the RTU, so they’re updating firmware, the RTU will check that that firmware was developed by Emerson and was intended for that device. It does that by certifying certificates on the load.
Now, once it’s in the device and it’s running in the field, you might say, “Well, the task is done,” but there’s an additional level of protection. It will continually and on boot, check that firmware, make sure the certificate still matches, it’s not being changed. And if it has been changed, it will actually revert to a known good factory firmware that’s basically embedded in the device. So you can see that there’s really five or six different things all checking and ensuring that firmware in that device was not compromised. So basically, multiple levels within the device, and in addition, there’s multiple levels on the network. So the bad guys have to get through a lot of different levels to damage or compromise the device. And we’re trying to do that with everything we design today.
Jim: Yeah. And with modern cryptography and making any change completely will change that hash and everything and make it impossible to slip something in without it being noticed. So that’s really a nice thing.
Steve: Yeah. And the fact that even if it detects it, it then goes back to factory firmware, which may be a slightly older version, but your operation will keep running. It will keep controlling, which is a very nice feature.
Jim: Yeah, that’s a great example there. I guess, going back to the PRA, what else does it include other than the segmentation that you discussed?
Steve: There’s about 10 high-level principles that cover aspects of the design and operation of the SCADA system. And for each of these, there’s various examples and guidance on how to actually follow the principle in a real-world system. So, for example, there was a whole section on how to manage third-party devices in the contractors, because on a pipeline system, you’re almost certainly gonna have, for example, engineers from Emerson coming in from third parties. So it gives examples on the real-world aspects of operating the system.
Jim: Are there other examples from it you can share?
Steve: Yeah. One important one is when you’re designing the system, you should identify and document all of the different data flows that occur. And that’s, when I say data flow, communications or conversation between different pieces of equipment. So, for example, this RTU may communicate with that SCADA platform on this particular machine and may communicate with a measurement system on another machine, document all of those data flows, and then deny all other data flows by default. Then, after the system is running, continually monitor it passively. And if you see an additional communication, say, between two pieces of equipment that normally never communicated or didn’t communicate on a particular IP socket, flag that immediately, because it may be something that’s going on that was unexpected. It certainly was outside the original design of the system.
Jim: This has been very educational. Thank you so much, Steve. Where can our listeners go to learn more?
Steve: Well, really a couple of places. If you go to the CISA blog, which is at www.cisa.gov/news-events, there’s details there. The actual PRA was published on March the 26th of this year. And also, if you want to discover more about Emerson’s involvement in wide-area SCADA and the cybersecurity associated with it, if you go to Emerson.com/SCADAforEnergy, you’ll find some information there.
Jim: Okay, great. And I’ll add some links to that and to some of the other things we discussed in the transcript. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Steve.
Steve: Not a problem. It’s a pleasure.
-End of transcript-
Due to the rapid advancement of technology, we face the issue of technology obsolescence in our daily lives. Control systems that have been operating for decades face this challenge. While incremental improvements can be made over time, sometimes a more comprehensive modernization project must be initiated to meet the control challenges and improvement opportunities of the production operations.
Emerson’s Scott Campbell joins me in this podcast to discuss the planning, execution, and follow-up of a successful modernization project.
Give it a listen and visit the Modernization section on Emerson.com for more information on the technologies and services to help you navigate your facility through the project and toward more efficient, reliable, and sustainable operations.
TranscriptJim: Hi, everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. Control systems are the lifeblood of production processes to keep them running safely, efficiently, and reliably. Like all technology, they can come to the end of their lives and require modernization. We shared some ways to simplify the control system modernization process in earlier podcasts, such as Simplifying Control System Modernization with DeltaV IO.Connect and Simplifying Your Path to Optimal Control with REVAMP. Today I’m joined by Scott Campbell, an experienced modernization consultant, to discuss the challenges surrounding modernization projects, the value that can be generated from these projects, and Emerson’s approach in helping customers achieve their business objectives and project goals. Welcome, Scott.
Scott: Thanks, Jim. Nice to be talking with you.
Jim: Well, it’s great having you sharing your expertise with our listeners today. Well, let’s jump right into things. What pains are our customers facing when we start interacting with them?
Scott: Well, like you mentioned, usually it starts with obsolescence. So, there are existing technologies at end of life, and a lot of times at that point they are buying parts off of eBay, trying to source them from other plants in their area, and generally just struggling to keep parts on hand. But in our conversations, we’ve learned that a lot of times, that’s not really enough to justify a project at that point. You know, these plants have lots of projects going on, lots of things they’re trying to fund, and lots of people fighting over capital. So, we’ve learned that obsolescence and fixing obsolescence for its own sake a lot of times isn’t enough to justify modernization projects anymore. So, we kind of have to look at the downstream effects. And we can see a lot of effects that having an aging control system has on a plant besides just that obsolescence. So that failing hardware can cause process shutdowns, can cause process disruptions, you know, loss of product when that happens, and obviously loss of the money-making part of their facility.
So that’s one of the justifications we see with the older technologies within these plants, that production quality limitations to throughput, just not getting everything they could out of their system and equipment, are all drivers to move these projects forward. And, you know, we’re seeing a lot more of a resource crunch in a lot of these facilities, where their staffing has been dwindling over the years and their engineering resources are cut. And to be honest, when they have a control system in the plant that’s 30, 40 years old or more, they struggle to get and retain resources. If you’re a 22-year-old controls engineer coming out of college, you don’t really wanna go work on something that’s already obsolete. So, all of those are drivers to get customers having these conversations.
Jim: Yeah, that sounds like a number of things from, you know, production and the financial impact of that, and just getting people to be able to work on it can all be part of the justification process. So, with all customers are facing, what’s their best path forward?
Scott: So, their path forward really at that point is to take on some kind of obsolescence project. We used to talk about migrations and call these projects migrations, but really, when we use the word “migration,” we’re talking about kind of a replace in kind. So, the customers getting that obsolescence issue fixed, maybe getting some weight off their shoulders that’s not looming over them, but it doesn’t necessarily move them forward technology-wise and they don’t get a lot of value of the new system. So really, we tend to talk now about modernization projects where it’s not necessarily just a replace in kind, but a refresh of the control system overall and a chance for them to look at their control system and really plant holistically. You know, some of these projects, when we go into do a modernization, we’ll touch on instrumentation like networking infrastructure, cybersecurity, documentation, a lot of things that go wider than the control system itself.
Jim: Yeah. That makes sense. You know, that replace in kind seems it kind of limits you to, you know, the thoughts of what you did 20, 30, 40 years ago. So, it seems like, yes, it is an opportunity and take advantage of what modern technology offers, too. Now, I’d assume, you know, with these drivers and the possibility of unplanned shutdowns and process disruptions, and things that the customers would be knocking down our doors for modernization projects. Is this actually happening?
Scott: Well, actually, no. A lot of times, there’s hesitancy from the customer’s standpoint. Even when they know they need to do something, they start looking at this as a possibility and kind of draw back from it. You know, these automation engineers and automation departments within these plants, they spend a lot of their time today just trying to keep the lights on. You know, we’re talking about aging technology that may be having failures that needs a lot more hands-on work just day to day. So, they have a day job, and their day job is running the plant with the system that they have in place. And we talked about, you know, the staffing shortages at some of these plants. They just don’t have the bandwidth to take on a whole nother project.
And most of them have never done this. We’re talking about systems, again, that have been in the plants for 30, 40 years. So, it’s not something that a plant does every 10 or 15 years that they have experience doing. So, when an automation manager or a plant manager at one of these facilities starts looking at this, a lot of times there’s a real hesitancy to get started just because it is so overwhelming.
Jim: Yeah. I can see that. If you got your hands full with just the day to day, that would seem like a huge mountain out there in front of you, and to figure out how to go forward, even if logically, you know, that’s what needs to be done. So, I guess if you’re, you know, breaking through and say, “Yep, we gotta do this,” what are the real challenges in executing a modernization project?
Scott: Well, there’s a lot of them, and they kind of span most of the things in the plant. But we bucket them, to start with usually, into time, money, and space, because a lot of times those are the constraints that drive how we execute these projects or start planning them. So, when we’re talking about time, we’re talking about a couple of different things. One is just the timeline of the project. Depending on how big the facility is or the process area we’re talking about, it could take a year or two years to do the project overall, so they have to start planning ahead. With this idea of obsolescence and unplanned shutdowns looming over them, they have to get started early. But on the project itself, we talk about time in the sense of a plant shutdown and what their timeline is and what their production schedule is. So those two go hand in hand with how long it takes to execute and how you can schedule for an actual planned shutdown. And that’s one of the main drivers for how we need to execute the project.
We also talk about space constraints. You know how it is, if you buy a bigger house and you tend to fill it as you live there for a little while, these plants kind of expand with projects to fit the space that they’ve got. And so, by the time we get in there, most of the square footage is taken up. You know, they’ve taken up with expansions or other projects they put in over time. And maybe their I/O room is full, or the control room doesn’t have any extra space. So, you kind of have to come up with a way to work alongside your existing infrastructure or plan around it to be able to get a new control system in there at all.
And of course, everything’s going to come down eventually to money. And most of these things have a tradeoff for the cost of the project itself. So, in general, we all kind of wanna pay as little as we can for what we need. But just like in real life, there are strategic investments that we can help the customers make to help save money in the long run. So it may be that spending a little more money on a project has a payoff at install. Doing a little more work on engineering makes a project cheaper to run the plant eventually. So, we have to talk about those tradeoffs.
And then kind of as minor challenges, we talk about risk, and we talk about complexity, both, and ways to…those are really kind of cost and time and space all bundled into their own metric. You know, how do we manage the risk? And you can pay more money to manage risk up front, or some customers just say, you know, “We’re willing to live with a certain level of unknown when we get into startup and just manage it there.” So, we’re always taking into account all of those factors and what a project should look like for that specific customer.
Jim: Okay. Now we’ve really hit on the challenges around time, space, and money, and those have to be factored in as well as the risk and complexity of everything. Now, I know those have to be weighed against the real benefits that you can get when doing a modernization project. Can you talk about what some of the benefits could be?
Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. When you’re talking about, you know, moving technology forward 30 or 40 years, there’s a lot that comes with that. And luckily, for a lot of our customers, just by installing DeltaV, a lot of those extra benefits just come along for the ride. So built into DeltaV, we have the ability to do, you know, basic loop tuning all the way up to advanced process control and multivariate control, all things that can improve the way that their plants are running today. Even if they’re not changing the actual structure of the controls, it can help them run tighter to baseline so they can, you know, increase throughput, maintain the quality they’re looking for. They cannot put as many expensive ingredients into the system as they may be doing today if they can run a little tighter to where their planned process variables are. So, a lot of that goes into just really increasing what the process itself can do, even with the existing instrumentation.
You know, we talked about…big data has been kind of a buzz word the last couple of years, maybe fallen off a little bit, but it still is getting a lot of run in the automation space. So, we talk about, you know, getting more data out of things, but getting it, contextualizing it, and using it appropriately is still something that we get asked about a lot, and it’s something that’s not as straightforward in a lot of systems. So just doing a DeltaV upgrade and some of the basics of what Emerson has to offer can help pull some of that data out of the silos it’s in today where it’s inaccessible with the existing systems, and contextualize it, put it in front of an operator or maintenance personnel, and give them access to make those decisions a lot easier. So, it increases the ability of the existing personnel on site to be able to run their plant better, smarter, and a little bit faster.
We talk about cybersecurity, it’s in the news a lot. And cybersecurity attacks on process plants have gone up, and so putting in a modern control system comes with some baked in cybersecurity. You know, the base DeltaV holds a lot of cybersecurity certifications. Just by installing that, you get a lot more control over who has access into your plant, and you have a buffer against the outside world. So, a lot of that just comes for the ride, and that’s before talking about, you know, the more advanced things you can buy and bolt onto your DeltaV system. So, it really moves people a long way forward, and there’s a lot you get out of just doing one of these projects.
Jim: Yeah. It seems like it. You talked about the data and having it contextualized. You know, there’s so many more things, you know, people are trying to operate more efficiently and sustainably, and all that. And data is such a key part to be able to see it, to drive it beyond, you know, what we imagined decades ago and what you need to do, just keep, you know, the plant running safely and everything. So, yeah, you talked about a lot of benefits in there and we discussed the challenges. So, do we get involved or help customers weigh the challenges against the benefits, you know, or what’s that process about?
Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. Emerson has realized, one, how important these projects are to our business, how important they are to our installed base and our customers, and also how difficult they are. So, they’ve really invested in being able to make these projects better, cheaper, faster, and reduce risk there. So, I’m a modernization consultant in the modernization solutions group led by Aaron Crews. And so, this is what I do kind of all day, every day. And what our groups aim is to make those projects run better. In some cases, that means going out to customer sites, coming up with a plan to plan out their project, to plan on what their plan should look like in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, working with our engineering centers and impact partners on estimates, you know, lots of consulting-level work to just come up with solutions for our customers and partners.
We also develop technologies outside of the normal DeltaV product lifecycle specifically to enable these projects. So, we have product lines out of the modernization group that are modernization-specific to help get the barriers to do modernization projects out of the way. Because of the emphasis Emerson puts on these projects, we’ve now done over 7,500 modernizations in 88 different countries. So, one of the biggest values we see is that while customers may do this once in a career, you know, once every 30 years, so having done these projects, you know, our group has a lot of experience that we can bring to the table for these customers who haven’t done this very often or haven’t ever done one of these before. And, you know, our job is to constantly innovate to bring the projects to fruition.
Jim: That’s a real important point where a customer may go through it once in their entire career. But we have a team of consultants that do these 7,500 projects you mentioned. So that’s bringing a lot of experience really across the project, from the planning upfront to seeing it through and being able to take advantage of, you know, what some of these technologies can bring you. Can you share or give us a little bit more enlightenment on the project approach if somebody’s moving forward with one of these modernization projects?
Scott: Sure. So, in coordination with whatever the customer’s normal project execution model is, whether it’s, like, a stage gate or a phased process, we have our own processes and standards behind the scenes that try to make these projects really standardized and remove some of the doubt around how they get executed. And it also helps us take advantage of the efficiencies built into having a set of resources as wide and as knowledgeable as we do. So, the global project management office helps to put together those standard deliverables, and intakes, and processes. And then, you know, across the U.S. and across the globe, we have Emerson engineering centers that a lot of times are doing these projects all the time as well.
So, they’re actually executing modernizations every day. It’s always great to hear about a new multi-billion-dollar brand-new facility that’s being built. And those are great projects for us to be invested in, and we love working on those, but, you know, they’re only so often that someone’s building a facility like that. Meanwhile, you know, if a plant has 100 I/O or 100,000 I/O, at some point the facility is gonna need an upgrade. So, we’re in those facilities all over the country and all over the world constantly doing these projects. So, the engineering centers have a lot of experience and a lot of people who have done these as well day in and day out.
Jim: I know from some of the earlier modernization-related podcasts that I mentioned at the start of the podcast that we have a broad offering of modernization solutions. Can you expand a little bit on how and where these are used and their impact on a project?
Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. So, we have a product portfolio that we call DeltaV Connect. And the portfolio is built in such a way that whatever timeline the customer is on, wherever they’re seeing obsolescence across their plants, and whatever their different installations are today where they may be having issues with it, we have a solution that can help with whatever it is that they’re facing. So, we have products that are meant to address each step along that path. For example, if Console.CONNECT… Console.CONNECT is an HMI operator interface solution for…You know, on the obsolescence path, HMIs, computer hardware, those are the shortest timeline. You know, you may replace a computer in your office or your laptop every three, four, or five years. And a lot of the automation hardware runs on similar platforms.
So, we have Console.CONNECT to come in and address that obsolescence at the HMI and computer hardware solution level. And what that allows us to do is put in a brand new DeltaV interface with some of the benefits that we see in technologies like DeltaV Live. And we can get those operator efficiency benefits right up front in a project without having to go through the three, four, five-year project lifecycle before they start seeing some benefits of modernization. We have a suite of wiring solutions that we call Flex.CONNECT. So, customers who wanna get the most value out of one of these projects, they may want to remove as much of the existing system as possible. So, get rid of everything, the controllers, the hardware, the I/O, and kind of start from the ground up to really refresh the entire system. Unfortunately, it’s pretty labor-intensive, time-intensive, and costs a lot of money.
With Flex.CONNECT, we can address part of that with these wiring solutions that are meant to reduce the amount of time it takes to rewire the I/O. So, what we do is go in and put in some prefabricated connectors, prefabricated cables, and reduce the individual number of screws and wires that an electrician touches on shutdown. So, we’re taking the amount of shutdown time down by quite a bit, you know, 10-fold or so. For some customers, though, even that reduction isn’t short enough. So, Flex.CONNECT isn’t an option because they just can’t be down that long. Or they have a really large facility that even with those advantages that Flex.CONNECT brings, it still leads to a multiple days of downtime, and they just can’t afford that in their production cycle.
So, you know, one of those products that you’ve talked about previously is IO.Connect. And IO.Connect being a software solution that allows DeltaV to control the native I/O of other systems without lifting any of those wires and without doing any of that fieldwork. So, the project then becomes essentially a software configuration project with a little networking on top. And the downtime goes from weeks or days down to hours, potentially. So, with all those solutions, they help with cutover planning and hardware strategy, and how do we go about getting the actual physical DeltaV system into the plant? But that’s only about half of the project, right? So, there’s a whole programming side that we still have to convert from the existing control system into DeltaV.
For that, we have a product that we call Revamp. Revamp is a cloud-hosted machine learning and AI tool that analyzes and documents the legacy control systems that we get from the customers on their running system. More than just documenting, Revamp goes an extra step and converts that through just pattern matching into actual DeltaV code. So, in the most efficient cases, we can go directly from a legacy control system code into DeltaV, all digitally and automated.
Jim: Yeah. That part is impressive. And we did a podcast on that earlier, and incorporating that machine learning and, you know, AI characteristics in there, it seems like it improves with every project we do because there’s more information that sees new configurations or that it hadn’t seen before. So that seems like a really powerful tool. Well, this has been a really great discussion, and I hope our listeners get a keen sense of the value you can get from these modernization projects and really a path forward to plan and execute a successful project for them to really reap some of these benefits. Where can they go to get a little more information?
Scott: Yeah. You can go out to Emerson.com/modernization, and from there it links to all of the different offerings that we talked about, all of the different Connect products. And you can reach out to your local Emerson contact or Impact Partner if you have a project that you wanna talk about or to get one of us out to look through your system, and we’d be happy to talk to you.
Jim: Well, that sounds great. You can learn about the technology offerings and connect in and get some of the expertise to help get you started in there. And I also recommend listening to the “I/O Connect” podcast and the “Revamp” podcast. And I’ll have links here in the transcripts as we post this. But for our listeners, you can also just do a search on “I/O, Connect” podcast or “Revamp” podcast, and you’ll find it that way. Well, Scott, thank you so much for joining me today to share your expertise with our listeners.
Scott: Yeah. Thanks a lot for having me on, Jim.
-End of transcript-
The Life Sciences industry has undergone significant changes over the past several years. From responses to a global pandemic to the advancement of personal therapies, the need for automation and effective data management has never been greater.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Dave Imming joins me to highlight some of these trends, the challenges they have introduced, and technology’s role in addressing them.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Life Sciences & Medical section on Emerson.com for more information on the technologies and solutions to help you drive greater performance.
TranscriptJim: Hi, everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. The life sciences industry is undergoing a significant amount of change in recent years. I’m joined today with Dave Imming to talk about some of these trends. Dave is the vice president of marketing and sales enablement for Emerson’s life sciences business and can comment on how these trends are shaping automation and data management strategies. Welcome, Dave.
Dave: Thanks, Jim. It’s great to be here.
Jim: Well, it is great having you, so let’s dive into it a little bit. Dave, what are some of the recent trends in life sciences?
Dave: Well, Jim, I think the biggest change or trend in the life sciences industry is the increasing number of technology breakthroughs and new modalities for biopharma now and in the coming years. This includes both the expanding biotech capabilities as well as these advanced therapy medicinal products, frequently shortened to ATMP. These technologies include cell therapy, gene therapy, and tissue engineering and hold incredible potential for new ways to cure diseases and also to improve our health.
In addition to that, while data has always been very important to the life science industry, there’s a huge drive to better capture and manage that data. Part of this is to streamline the release process, which is tied to collecting and verifying the appropriate data, but also to have that data available for additional analysis. And specifically, companies are beginning to work to see how they can harness artificial intelligence, or AI, to pour through that data and bring out new insights, and identify ways of doing things even better.
Jim: Wow. That does sound like a lot is going on here. So how are the new ATMP processes similar to the traditional biotech and, in other ways, how are they different?
Dave: Well, Jim, there are a lot of ways where they are very similar to traditional biotech. In both, you know, ATMP and biotech, the process development activity has lots of flexibility. But then this flexibility gets narrowed down as you move towards commercial manufacturing. Of course, in commercial manufacturing, there has to be very strict adherence to process requirements and almost no flexibility for obvious reasons of quality and consistency. But likewise, the recipe management, batch records, equipment and material tracking, all those things are quite similar across the various types of life science modalities. But there are also many differences.
When we talk about advanced therapy medicinal products, this space tends to have many more but smaller batches. Each batch is created for a specific patient population, and the therapy is highly targeted, which is great, but it does lead to lots of smaller batches, and in the extreme, it is referred to as personalized medicine or autologous, which is one batch for one patient. And by increasing the number of batches, this has a huge impact on the data collection and management requirements. Each data set with all of the information on materials, equipment, process conditions, all have to be captured and managed. For personalized medicine, it would also include the tracking of the patient samples together with the data for chain of identity, chain of custody, chain of environment, and all the parameters that might affect a sample. The reality is that these new therapies are amazing, but they are making the supply chain for life sciences much more complex than in the past. And in addition, many of these new ATMP processes are more manual and less automated in the past. And this is due in part to patient variability that must be accounted for and adjusted in the processing.
Jim: Well, that’s no small set of challenges there. So, I imagine automation can play a role to help with that. But, you know, it’s what we’ve been doing for years, isn’t automation automation?
Dave: Well, in some ways, you’re right, it is more the same in some cases. But as I mentioned, many of these new processes are done more manually, but with a fair amount of human intervention. And again, as I said a moment ago, this accounting for patient variability. So, this can be especially true of the personalized medicine or autologous therapies. In those cases, the, you know, automation, if you will, tends to be more of providing a guided or prompted path for the operator where the automation lays out, “Here’s the next steps that need to be completed and the data that needs to be collected for that.” And then the operator would adjust these steps as necessary based on the patient sample characteristics.
So, another difference is that while traditional pharma and biotech certainly utilize skids, this is done to a much greater degree in the ATMP market, utilizing specialized skids combined together or creating a work cell for that particular therapy. Scheduling can be very challenging in this space, in part due to the bidirectional flow of samples and therapeutic products, personalized medicine, and allocating capacity against patient demand, and ensuring that the round trip from collecting the patient sample, processing it, and getting it back to the patient is all done within the allowable timeframe for that particular therapy.
So advanced control techniques is another area that can be leveraged in some cases, and analytical capabilities like PAT [process analytical technology] or Spectral PAT data can be used as soft sensors, which allows operators to have real-time information on some of their metrics where they normally have to wait for a lab sample to be processed. So having that real-time metric using spectral PAT technology can be a real benefit in some cases.
And another thing is that with many of these batches, when they have more of them, it’s smaller in size, while the automation is similar, the throughput of just the number of batches that they’re dealing with increase significantly. So, it’s important that your automation system is up to that task of the higher capacity. Some of our customers that we work with are increasing their capacity in multiples of 10x, you know, each year as they increase the capacity for these new therapies. It also dramatically increases the demands on your data management system, as you might imagine, to capture all of that data from these mini batches, set the data in context so that it can be easily retrieved, consolidated, and as well, compared and analyzed in the future for new learnings.
Jim: Wow, that 10x growth made my eyes widen in there. Growing that kind of capacity in there sounds like scheduling of all these batches, particularly for ones of those autologous…and I think I just learned a new word here today. Those autologous therapies would be challenging, is it?
Dave: Oh, yes, it absolutely can be. As I mentioned earlier, there’s the challenge of moving the patient samples to the operational area and then back, all while tracking the environmental conditions in both directions and getting it completed within that allowable time that has been put forth for that particular therapy. So, it makes it especially important that things run as smoothly as possible in the operations process. For example, Emerson’s DeltaV Real-Time Scheduling has been used in this space, cell therapy offerings, to manage the schedule and keep things on track for the production process.
DeltaV Real-Time Scheduling is extremely dynamic and can respond and adjust or alter the overall plan schedule based on real-time conditions. This might include variability in processing due to cell growth. It might be due to unplanned events, like a specific skid or piece of equipment having a fault, or perhaps being unavailable for some reason. So now what? Well, the “now what” is handled by DeltaV Real-Time Scheduling, which takes the event into account and then adjusts the schedule automatically with the least impact on production. There’s also a companion product [DeltaV Discrete Event Simulation] to the scheduler for capacity planning and debottlenecking. This product can be extremely helpful to help users see and understand where the dwell times are in the process and what opportunities they might have to reduce the cycle time and, therefore, increase their production capabilities.
Jim: Well, those technologies sound like..I just envisioned the big spreadsheet and trying to keep up with it manually and optimize as best you can so to have that online and be able to say, “Okay, now here’s the schedule,” that seems like that can go a long way for the efficiency of the operation. Now, Dave, you had mentioned data management and real-time release. Can you elaborate a little more on those?
Dave: Sure. And so, what I’m talking about there is that when they do the production of these, you know, drugs or therapy products, before they’re able to release them and get them shipped out, they have to go through a quality review or release process to do that. And, of course, a lot of what drives that process is data. So, they have to make sure that they can sync up all the data associated with that particular production batch. And in the case of personalized medicine, that would include the patient samples being synced to the processing, to the materials used, the equipment used, and put all those in context with the batch information. And then any exceptions that occurred during the production process need to be captured during that process and then resolved prior to when they can do the release.
One of the offerings we have is called Quality Review Manager, which helps customers review and resolve captured exceptions so that they can go through those, figure out what’s happened, and then resolve them and release the material more quickly, which again, that helps a company be much more financially successful. And of course, for these autologous or personalized medicine processes, the timing is often crucial, which relates directly to capturing the right data in real-time and getting it released and shipped because the shelf life of these treatments can be quite limited. So, it’s like real-time release on steroids to beat the clock and getting the therapy back to the patient.
Data is also critical in both directions. When a sponsor company uses a contract development and manufacturing organization, or CDMO, the data on how to do the therapy must be transferred to the CDMO. And then when a batch is executed, the CDMO typically transfers the batch data, either some part or all of it, back to the sponsor organization for them to confirm the release. So again, the supply chain is much more complicated in these new therapies. And everyone in the industry is moving towards more sophisticated data stores, sometimes replacing, but more often augmenting their time series historian with something that can accommodate many more data types in which can set the data in context, which helps them make the post-processing analysis just that much more valuable. And as mentioned earlier, people are beginning to explore what artificial intelligence can do for them to gain more insights from their data or help them do their operations work.
Jim: Yeah. It just sounds like the complexity is all around that and trying to manage it and make sense of it and all is just a growing challenge. So, what product offerings do Emerson and AspenTech offer to help with all this?
Dave: Well, there’s a number of things that we have, we have a very comprehensive portfolio for our life science customers. And in the area of data management, you know, some of the ones that come to mind immediately are this Quality Review Manager that I mentioned, which is part of our DeltaV MES [Manufacturing Execution System], or formerly known as Syncade MES offering. We have IP21 [Aspen InfoPlus.21], which is a time series historian. And then we have [AspenTech] Inmation, which is a data management product from our AspenTech partner. And Inmation is an extremely flexible database which can handle all sorts of data types and also put them in context, which helps people utilize the data, find the data, retrieve the data much more easily than without that context, and knowing the relationships between data that then later AI analysis can create new conclusions and new insights by looking at those relationships between the data, that’s all based on the context that Inmation provides. So those are probably the three top offerings that would come into play in this data management space.
Jim: Yeah. It sounds like having that glue to take these different sources and methods and all that, make sense of it, and then add the AI on top of it to help make sense of it and point you in a path in the right direction, that does seem helpful there. So, does Emerson have anything to help life science companies with managing how they transfer data or data management, I guess, you know, products to help get these products to market faster?
Dave: Yeah. Absolutely. That is a huge area of interest. Jim, as bad as the pandemic was, one of the good things that came out of that experience for everyone in the life sciences industry was to see what is possible in terms of accelerating the pipeline and moving something from laboratory into production, and get all the checks done very quickly and efficiently. And so, that’s really started a lot of wheels turning in terms of how we can do that better.
Emerson has a number of things going on in that area. One is in the area of process knowledge management. In that category, we have an offering called [DeltaV] Process Specification Management, or PSM. And Process Specification Management helps a life science company gather, collect, store, and organize all the information as they’re doing drug development. And they help pull all that specification information together so that it can be submitted for approvals to the regulatory bodies and also that it can be passed downstream when they need to run pilots for clinicals or when they need to transition to commercial manufacturing. And this is something where making that tech transfer much faster than it has been historically.
In the past, this has taken years to move something from the lab into commercial production. And Emerson has created a consortia of companies to work together with Emerson to tackle this problem and come up with some really game-changing technologies to make that tech transfer much, much faster than it’s been in the past. And it’s a combination of some of the current offerings, like Process Specification Management. There’s also [DeltaV] Process Risk Assessment to help you look at the risk associated with various techniques as you’re doing your development, together with this tech transfer effort that we’re doing with the consortia to see if we can really cut that time by, like, an order of magnitude as we go into the future.
Jim: Well, yeah, and I think taking that collaborative type of approach should really help whatever ways to squeeze down that whole tech transfer process. Now, Dave, I’ve heard these ATMP treatments are amazing, but rather expensive. How can we help biopharmaceutical manufacturers get the costs down to make them more accessible?
Dave: Yeah, Jim, that’s a really good point. And again, as you mentioned, these treatments are just mind-boggling and amazing as far as what they can accomplish. Instead of just treating cancer, they can actually cure cancer, which is fantastic. But you’re right, they do sometimes come with a price point or a cost that is pretty high. Interestingly, it’s really not the manufacturing process where most of the costs come from, most of it is in that development timeline that they go through. And so, these things that we just talked about, the process specification management, the tech transfer solutions, those are the areas that we can really help the life science companies be much more streamlined and help get their products to market faster. And when they do that, that can substantially reduce the cost for patients and bring more accessibility to these life-giving treatments.
Jim: Yeah, that makes sense. That typical how long it took to get, you know, from what we think would work up to production levels was a very, very, very long timeline there. Now, you talked a little bit about collaboration in that area, but I understand there’s also collaborative efforts going on in the life sciences industry. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Dave: Yeah. Absolutely. There are many different organizations, industry groups in the life sciences industry which help companies, both end users as well as some of the vendors that serve this market, share ideas and help tackle some of these problems together. BioPhorum is one of the ones that we spend time at their meetings. I’ve been to a number of their sessions. Really, really good collaboration with other folks in the industry and talking about some of these problems and how we can make things better. NIIMBL is another one that we work with very, very closely. ISPE, another great organization that helps move the industry forward. And there’s others, but those are some of the big three that Emerson and AspenTech work closely with.
They work on things like standards, ontology, the nomenclature and the data structures that we wanna have a common way of talking and passing information back and forth, which can make things much easier. We work on pilot programs, we work on proof of concepts to take some of these new technologies and find a place to try them out, and then publish that so that others can benefit from that research. So, a lot of great work being done by those organizations, and we’re very happy to be a part of those efforts.
Jim: And I invite our listeners, if you’re on the blog, do a search on, like, BioPhorum, because I know our subject matter experts get involved in a lot of what gets developed and then published as part of it. So, we’ve recap several of the things they put out over the years, so I invite our listeners to go find that. Well, this has been a very educational discussion and one I really appreciate you sharing, Dave, but where can our listeners go for more?
Dave: Well, yeah, we have quite a bit of information up on the website, as you might imagine. If you go to Google and you google “Emerson” or “Emerson Aspen Tech and life sciences,” you’ll very quickly find our Life Sciences and Medical page, and from there you can find more about, you know, some of these ATMP therapies or markets and the different products and solutions that both Emerson and AspenTech have to help these customers and our life science partners deliver some of these to patients.
Jim: That’s great. And some of the products you mentioned along the way, I’ll make sure to include hyperlinks to where there’s more information available on all of those. Well, Dave, this has been great and a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Dave: Absolutely. Happy to do it, Jim.
-End of transcript-
You may have heard of various color adjectives used to describe hydrogen production based on the amount of CO2 produced as a byproduct. Green hydrogen comes from renewable energy sources, powering an electrolyzer to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Blue hydrogen is produced from typical sources like natural gas, but the CO2 produced as a byproduct is captured and stored away. This decarbonization process is one of the reasons why companies like oil refineries and chemical plants choose blue hydrogen as a fuel source and feedstock.
In this podcast, Scot Bauder describes the important role that valves, actuators, and regulators play in optimizing and scaling these production operations in applications like steam methane reformers (SMR) and autothermal reformers (ATR).
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Blue Hydrogen Valve, Regulator & Actuator Solutions section on Emerson.com. Here, you’ll find advanced blue hydrogen production valve solutions that are not just safer and smarter but also more reliable, ensuring your operations are always in good hands.
TranscriptJim: Hi, this is Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts Podcast.” You likely have heard about hydrogen’s role as an energy carrier in global efforts in an energy transition to non-carbon sources. Today, I’m joined by Scot Bauder, sales director for Flow Control solutions for the sustainable industries, to discuss hydrogen energy, specifically the production of blue hydrogen, with a focus on end users like chemical plants and oil refineries. We’ll be discussing the crucial role valves, regulators, and actuators play in blue hydrogen production for safe and efficient operations. I’ll start by letting Scot explain what blue hydrogen is all about. Welcome, Scot.
Scot: Thanks, Jim. Just as you’ve promised our listeners, I’ll talk a little bit about what exactly blue hydrogen is, but I’ll also talk about the different colors of hydrogen. Hydrogen comes in many different colors, and really, the colors are dependent on the carbon intensity of the different hydrogen types. The two most common are probably green and blue hydrogen. Green hydrogen coming from energy sources that are non-polluting, like wind, solar, hydroelectric, things of that nature. And then the blue hydrogen is where typically natural gas is used, and the CO2 emissions are removed through the process of making the hydrogen. This is important to large industrial customers, where they have a large demand for hydrogen, and the blue hydrogen processes tend to support that a little better.
Jim: Okay. Got it. So, why are companies in the downstream hydrocarbon industries like oil refineries and chemical plants using blue hydrogen as a feedstock for their operations?
Scot: That’s a good question. So, these industries, the petrochemical industry and the refining industries, have been using hydrogen to finish and make products for decades now. As the world has moved to reduction of its carbon footprint from different processes, many of these large companies have adopted ESG and sustainability goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their processes themselves. Again, you know, making a large quantity of hydrogen, blue hydrogen is a great method of doing that. It’ll meet their demands for their products, but at the same time, being able to reduce or remove that CO2 emission that comes with it.
There’s also many countries that have decarbonization goals that have been legislated or been imposed by stockholders or shareholders of the company. With that, there’s either carbon taxes from the government or a lot of governments also incentivize customers to help remove their CO2 emissions from their processes. We, in North America, and around the world, there’s a lot of areas that have natural gas. It’s relatively inexpensive, and it makes a great feedstock for blue hydrogen. And right now, it is cheaper than green hydrogen.
Many companies are investing in blue hydrogen, like Linde, they have a Nederland project in the Gulf Coast here in the United States, and then Exxon is also working on a project for their Texas Baytown site to add a blue hydrogen unit for that facility also.
Jim: Yeah. I see and hear a lot about carbon capture projects going on in different spots. So that really is a lot of activity there. Well, blue hydrogen is produced via steam methane reforming, or SMR, and autothermal reform, called ATR. What are the critical aspects of blue hydrogen production using the SMR and ATR processes?
Scot: Both processes have benefits. The steam methane-reforming root process has been around for a very long time. It’s commonly used today at the petrochem and refining sites to make gray hydrogen by adding the CO2 removal, then they can make blue hydrogen and, again, reduce those greenhouse gas emissions from those processes. Newer in this area is the autothermal reforming technology. The real big benefit it brings is efficiency. It only has one CO2 source in the process, and it, again, increases the efficiency and reduces the complexity of capturing the CO2, where steam methane reforming has a CO2 component in the reaction when they’re making hydrogen itself and then also a CO2 removal component from the combustion process.
Jim: That’s interesting. I was familiar with SMR, but I hadn’t heard about ATR. So, I’ve learned something here today, and hopefully so have some of our listeners. I know safety is a paramount concern for the industry. What are some safety concerns related to blue hydrogen, and how do valves play a role in helping to ensure safe operations?
Scot: Yeah. There are several areas in the blue hydrogen process that safety comes into play. One is the mitigation of leaks. We know anytime we’re in a process environment that valves and pipe flanges and those things can have leaks. You know, when we’re working with fuel gases, with that being natural gas in this case, and then a product of hydrogen coming out of that, it’s always important to have the right products that you can isolate the process when you’re shutting it down, and then if there is a need to shut down the unit in an emergency, you know, isolation products like KTM ball valves can play a critical role in that safe operation.
Pressure relief valves [PRVs] are always important to protect the system from overpressure during the process operation. Anderson Greenwood has some nice pilot-operated PRV valves that have a monitoring component to them, being able to provide data of if there is an emission or a relief action that’s taken, you may be able to measure how long that was, and then also help learn through that process. Those valves also have an inherent ability to reseat themselves after an event, which is important. Hopefully, if there is any event, it’s short, and those valves can help reduce those emissions to the environment.
And then the last thing that spans across many of the valves that are used in processed plants, Emerson isolation valves and control valves, we have an extensive line of packing systems that fit with the extensive line of valves that have been tested ISO 15848, which has become the global standard for packing testing, and then also, you know, just having tight non-emitting packing systems. And we also have third-party certifications and testing that’s been done to the ISO standard that are available with our products.
Jim: Well, that sounds like a number of things to address those safety concerns. And I know from the monitoring of the pressure relief valves, I was recently at an environmental health and safety conference, and that was a large topic just from a regulatory standpoint to really track what the emissions were, how long, the amount. So that’s really important technology, I think it’s growing in importance. So, what are the challenges related with SMR blue hydrogen units? And how can valves help address these challenges?
Scot: Yeah. So, with an SMR, probably the biggest efficiency or challenge is the fuel gas to steam ratio and, you know, efficiency of energy use and also the emissions that come from that. It’s important to have control valves that have been sized correctly. Those are the components that help control that process and the output of that process. Fisher has a wide range of easy-e globe valves that fit well within that process and can be sized with the correct trim & actuation to meet those needs. Teamed with a DVC6200 positioner that gives accurate control, again, will help promote safe operation of the unit. And then at the end, you know, it also improves the yield across the unit, increases the chemical and catalyst lifespan, and again, just brings that efficiency across the entire process unit.
Jim: Yeah. So, it sounds like energy savings, better product yields, some ways that the technology can help there. That’s great. And I guess similarly, what are the challenges with ATR in blue hydrogen units, and how can valves address those?
Scot: Right. That’s a good question. So, with the ATR units, the temperatures are much higher. The way that that process is designed with the reactor unit, the temperatures are much higher than the SMR. With that, that brings challenges in the right materials and the valve products that can help control and then isolate those units when they’re in operation.
A good valve we’ve seen there is the triple offset valve from Vanessa. It’s capable of high-temp applications and will seal tight, you know, based on the inherent triple offset design and the way that seal works in that product. On the flip side, the ATR, again, like I said earlier, has a single CO2 emissions. So, you know, having the right products and being able to control just continues to add to the efficiency that we see with the ATR technology itself.
In fact, both Linde and Exxon of their blue hydrogen units that have been built or they’re in the process of working on, are both going to use the ATR process. So, I think we’ll see more of this in the future. You know, these are large process units running, you know, large quantities of hydrogen. So, the efficiency definitely will have a payback in the long term.
Jim: Yeah. That makes sense, that the more efficient process should be able to win out over time. And I know that hydrogen is a tiny little molecule, and so given that, how does that impact the valve material selection?
Scot: Yeah. Hydrogen brings some challenges with it, just at the molecular level. You know, one of the biggest challenges from a metallic standpoint is the potential of embrittlement of those materials. Emerson has invested in quite a bit of hydrogen testing in the last couple years. We’ve done metallic testing, you know, where we’ve saturated test samples in an outdoor lab and then tested those samples after they’ve been saturated at a pressure and a certain duration of time, you know, bring them back, do mechanical testing on them, looking for embrittlement.
We have not found if the right materials are used, typically, 316 stainless steel or carbon steel is in the right condition. We’re not seeing any mechanical impacts from hydrogen embrittlement or really absorption of that hydrogen that would lead to the embrittlement. With that, you know, we’ve also been supplying hydrogen valves in the refining industry for probably 50 years now, and we’re not seeing failures or other issues with those products that have been used, you know, in the refining and petrochemical applications, again, for decades.
If we look at soft parts, packing, and gaskets, again, those materials, we’re not seeing absorption issues with the hydrogen. So, again, a lot of standard materials that we’ve used for many years fit well within these applications in the hydrogen space.
Jim: I’ve always heard that concern that hydrogen embrittles metals, but it’s good to hear through the course of that testing that you’re just not seeing it, that you’re not seeing failures from doing that. So that’s great news. I guess blue hydrogen is a cleaner gas because the production process of blue hydrogen molecules captures carbon dioxide or CO2. I guess, where are some of the common challenges associated with the CO2 capture process, and how can valves help solve them?
Scot: Yeah. So, again, the process that we’re seeing the companies use is chemical amine process, which has been used by the industry for a long time to remove CO2 and other gases from different flue streams. This technology is proven, it’s understood, and with that, we have experience. We know there are some inherent applications with the chemical amine process that brings noise and cavitation. An example would be a lean amine feed control valve. We see those valves cavitate based on the typical process conditions. Fisher has Cavitrol trim that will address that cavitation and remove that opportunity, and really protect the valve in the system from any cavitation damage.
And then another application that’s common in the amine process is a rich amine letdown valve. And common to this is outgassing, you know, depending on the process conditions. In those applications, we tend to use a noise attenuation trim. In the case of Fisher control valves, that would be a Whisper III trim set. And again, that will reduce the outgassing and then the noise that would be associated with that.
Jim: Okay. That sounds great. After CO2 is captured, what is the next challenge in the process?
Scot: Yeah. So, we’ve kind of walked through the process of how we make the blue hydrogen, and the goal is to capture that CO2. Now there has to be a path to store that or use it in a different way. Right now, we’re seeing a lot of projects that are around the carbon capture and then also into the storage. And when we get into the storage piece of it, compression will become an element in those processes. And anytime we have compression, we’ve got a compressor, and anti-surge is always a concern on those compressors.
We have technology with [anti-surge] control valves, as well as our optimized digital valve using a Fisher DVC6200, that can protect that compressor and ensure that there’s not a process upset if something does not go to plan. And then from there, once it’s compressed, you know, typically it will be put in a pipeline and it will be moved to another location for storage, whether that’s sequestration or, again, to be used in a different type of product.
When we get into the pipeline side of things, you know, those tend to be more remote. We do have some nice actuators from Bettis. We have some electric actuators that work well for modulating and on-off. And Bettis has also developed a new product in the last couple years, it’s called ECAT. It’s a pipeline actuator that has zero emissions. So, a lot of times, the pipeline actuation uses the pipeline gas as the motive force for the actuator. This ECAT actuator can use CO2 or natural gas and not emit any of that to the atmosphere. So, another nice piece, you know, removing CO2 as a greenhouse gas emission, this fits well with that scheme of not putting that back into the atmosphere.
Jim: Yeah. That’s an important technology as everyone’s trying to drive their methane emissions to negligible amounts. To wrap up, Scot, can you summarize some of the key challenges related to blue hydrogen production and the role that valves, regulators, and actuators play in ensuring reliable and safe operations?
Scot: Yes, Jim. Many of the challenges that we talked about in blue hydrogen production center around high temperatures, potential embrittlement of metallics, cavitation, noise, and high-pressure drops. Correct valve selection has a direct impact on a plant’s reliability and profitability. Remote applications are best served with electric actuation that focuses on zero emissions. We also talked about extensive lab testing that Emerson has completed in the hydrogen space to ensure that the materials that are selected resist or prevent embrittlement from happening in the hydrogen applications, and always important to select equipment that promotes safe and efficient plant operations.
Jim: Well, that sounds pretty comprehensive of how we can help the hydrogen producers and, I guess, on the consuming side of the hydrogen coming in, as we’ve done for decades. And I guess, finally, where can our listeners go to learn more about valve solutions for blue hydrogen applications?
Scot: That’s a good question. For more information, you can go to emerson.com/blueh2valves, and that will take you to our page, that will take you deeper into the hydrogen applications specific to blue hydrogen and the products that support those challenges that come with that process.
Jim: And I’ll make sure to put a link to that, the emerson.com/blueh2valves, as well as some of the other products you mentioned through the course of the podcast so our listeners can go learn more about each of those. Scot, I wanna thank you so much for sharing your expertise today with our listeners.
Scot: Thanks, Jim. It’s been great to be on the podcast with you, and hopefully, everybody learned something along the way.
-End of Transcript-
As the hype around generative artificial intelligences (Gen-AI) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Bing Chat, increases, there is a false belief that it will replace many human creative products like written content, computer code, technical documents, graphic works…
So far, these affordable and free AI tools have been widely used to create content that has non-critical implications.
But some concerns may arise, if we consider to apply AI tools to the industrial world, where uptime, reliability and security are critical elements to deliver solid and accurate results, and people and companies that rely on Gen-AI in an open-source world, are ultimately responsible for any negative outcome.
There are some considerations to be made, before we come to understand how artificial intelligence can effectively but carefully be applied within the context of industrial automation and before answering the following question: can AI accelerate industry in the right direction?
What is “intelligence”?
Recently, an article from Emerson’s Director of PACSystems Controls and Compute Portfolio, Darrell Halterman on how Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged in the industrial world to generate a positive impact and help experts to maximize their efforts, has appeared in the magazine Controls Engineering US.
In his article, Halterman, who owns a decennial expertise helping customers finding the right automation strategies to enable new levels of performance, reliability, and value in their enterprises, outlines the meaning of “Intelligence”.
We are used to consider intelligence what a person knows.
Historically, knowledge was built through the study of books, documents, and other written materials.
With the advent of the internet, as tons of data and facts are immediately accessible to anyone online, the definition of intelligence has shifted.
It can be defined as the capacity of a person to identify the best source of information and use it as useful insights.
An insight is a deep understanding of a situation or problem that goes beyond a simple information: it’s a form of clarity that reveals key elements and helps disclosure hidden connections.
Still, the verification of the accuracy of source data is crucial, as errors have always existed.
With so many data available and the continuous stream of new information, it is increasingly difficult for humans to find that “real” and true information, and we tend to rely on AI responses without questioning them, simply because we don’t own better resources or a comprehensive background.
This is where the most relevant differentiator comes, according to the author: discernment.
The first way to apply discernment is by posting the right question.
Secondly, discernment should be applied to assess if the answer generated by AI is correct: this ability can be only based on real life experiences, context, and background and it’s essential to verify if the answer is not only inaccurate but even dangerous.
Discernment can be therefore defined as the experience applied over knowledge, or in other words, subject matter experts (SMEs).
The possibility alone, to access to a greater amount of data, does not create the expertise. In fact, the opposite is true: it’s the “expert” who has developed sufficient discernment by experience, that can take advantage of AI data to maximize efforts.
That’s why manufacturing and processing organizations that aim to optimize their operations and overall efficiency must consider to equip SMEs with AI tools to accelerate their work, suggests the author.
For example, Gen-AI capability to generate language models can be used to produce industrial automation design or optimization activity, but it is only when training data sets are carefully curated by the SMEs, that it is possible to avoid any potentially erroneous data source.
Not only: SMEs competencies are still required to verify the outputs.
In fact, using Gen-AI to create entertainment contents has a lower probability to cause harm to human security, while generating the “wrong” code for driving machinery or operations, can be very dangerous.
At Emerson we are realizing how Gen-AI in the hands of SMEs can accelerate repetitive tasks. Instead, using AI for complex tasks, cannot be faster than traditional methods that involve human capabilities.
The idea that Gen-AI will be managing complex processes in the factory autonomously and without the supervision of human expertise, is utopian. Instead, skilled experts remain the irreplaceable resource to realize this kind of projects.
While companies and users continue to explore Gen-AI technologies, the author lists a number of proven and easy to implement strategies that Emerson has already in place and that can be seamlessly deployed in the factory, from Floor to Cloud™.
Read the full article here and discover how to build a strong technology foundation to increase productivity and optimizing manufacturing. Emerson experts are carefully evaluating AI and other advanced technologies to empowering users to leverage their industry expertise, and eventually incorporating AI tools in the most beneficial ways.
The nature of intelligence has evolved over time, and the advent of the internet means that finding reliable information has risen in importance, compared with studying written materials for years to gain knowledge.
Process Analytical Technology, or PAT, was introduced by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration back in 2004. The purpose of this guidance was:
…to describe a regulatory framework (Process Analytical Technology, (PAT) that will encourage the voluntary development and implementation of innovative pharmaceutical development, manufacturing, and quality assurance.
Raman spectrometers perform spectral analysis to enable consistent product quality, process intensification, and real-time control. The challenge with their use is to integrate their wealth of multivariate data into the control strategies to drive these performance improvements.
Boundless Automation liberates data to unleash the power of software to drive world-class performance. One example is Emerson’s solutions for PAT-based manufacturing, which helps streamline manufacturing processes by integrating multivariate data and real-time process models to manage critical quality attributes and predict final product quality during production. DeltaV Spectral PAT brings in real-time multivariate analysis to help enable fully automated manufacturing for improved speed-to-market.
In this podcast, Emerson’s Jorge Costa and Bruce Greenwald join me to discuss the application of PAT technologies not only within the Life Sciences but across many of the process and hybrid manufacturing industries.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Process Analytical Technology and DeltaV Spectral PAT sections on Emerson.com for ways to help you drive innovation and improved performance.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts Podcast. Process Analytical Technology, or PAT, is a known solution for in-line, real-time quality monitoring in manufacturing. Yet, one can debate to what extent it has been adopted across industries. Emerson has recently released DeltaV Spectral PAT to help the industry further progress in their PAT journey.
This podcast will revisit PAT’s value proposition, highlight the technology, and recommend a strategy to realize the full potential of PAT in manufacturing. Bruce Greenwald and Jorge Costa have been collaborating on PAT business development, namely in the Life Sciences industry. Bruce Greenwald is the DeltaV platform business development sales director based in Austin, Texas.
And Jorge Costa is a Life Sciences industry consultant based in Lisbon, Portugal. Welcome, Bruce and Jorge.
Jorge: Hi, Jim. Thanks for having me.
Bruce: Thanks, Jim.
Jim: Hey, it’s great to have you both. Why don’t we get started? Bruce, can you share a little bit of your background with our listeners?
Bruce: Sure. I’m a 1979 graduate of the University of Kansas where I majored in chemical engineering with an emphasis in process control and have spent the last 50-plus years in the automation space, working on originally our Provox platform. And then moving to the DeltaV platform back in the early 2000s.
Jim: Well, that sounds like a great backdrop and background there. Jorge, can you share your background as well?
Jorge: Sure. So I am, as you said, I’m based in Lisbon. So I studied here and did my career over here. I have a degree in chemical engineering in the nineties.
I joined Life Sciences industry in 99. I worked as an automation engineer for a few years, then went into automation management and corporate management. I spent a lot of time on process digital transformation and digital transmission strategies. And in the last two years, I joined Emerson as a Life Sciences consultant, as you said, and I’m also helping here about bringing the value message to our customers about the solutions from AspenTech and Emerson.
Jim: Well, that’s great. Thank you both for that background. Well, let’s get started and dive into the topic of PAT. Jorge, let me start with you, what is the value of PAT to the industry? And I guess what industries can it fit?
Jorge: Well, thank you for this question. So yeah, definitely, there is a big value, and there are different dimensions of this value.
I would say performance, compliance, throughput, and safety is what comes to my mind. So I can help break down and kind of give you some more context. So when we are talking about PAT, it’s about bringing the capabilities of the quality control lab into the production shop floor. And, you know, as a result of a process, of data modeling that starts in development space that can correlate statistically product quality with some analytical equipment raw data.
So if such work, on modeling, is developed and then transferred to the shop floor, it’s enabling to have inline real-time quality monitoring in the process. And this is as a first perspective. First, I mentioned that it is a huge boost to performance because it eliminates all the manual work that we are used to seeing in the industry on managing samples between production facilities and quality control lab facilities.
And all the necessary steps that are also eliminated and the time and the cost associated to it from the standpoint of extracting the sample to the moment where the sample is actually analyzed and results are produced, checked, and then eventually transferred back to production records that will potentially drive decisions to make process adjustment.
All these sequence, all these cycle takes time, involves lots of labor from different key roles in operations. So comes at the cost that is significant. And because it’s so manual, it has inherently some variability. All of that is now streamlined by using PAT and so productivity, consistency, batch-to-batch, and consistent quality.
Also, of course, compliance, as I said, comes to my mind. So less transcription of data. Less variability. Also the fact that there is less variability allows to operate closer to quality limits and that’s why I talk about throughput as well. So you can challenge the process further. And safety I’ll leave it to last because there’s I would say minor contribution to safety because there’s less exposure of people to the product since we are eliminating all the sample management.
Regarding what industries can it fit? Yeah, definitely Life Sciences, which is where I’m coming from and it’s closer to my heart, but definitely any process that has chemical transformation involved and requires chemical analysis. And so that will span from Life Sciences through oil and gas, chemicals, pulp and paper and metals and mining, I would say.
Oh, and by the way, food and beverage definitely as well. So let me summarize these. Life Sciences, oil & gas, chemicals, pulp & paper, metals & mining, and food & beverage.
Jim: Which pretty much sounds like most of the process industries and hybrid industries and yeah, so if there’s sampling involved in that, I think you really hit on those challenges really well of, you know, it’s manual, so it’s time-based, there’s time lags and getting the information back to make whatever adjustments need to be made, a whole host of things that if you can automate that process much more, it’ll drive a lot of really good things from quality to availability, to throughput that you mentioned.
So let me stick with you a minute here, Jorge, what strategic and operational aspects should an organization consider in introducing?
Jorge: So as in all things that are related to digital transformation, I would start by people reviewing work processes and finally the technology. So starting by people as a standpoint of strategic actions, it’s very important to assess if the organization has the right people. And so I’m talking about PAT scientists, data scientists are key for the correct preparation of introduction of such kind of technology.
In terms of the actual work process or strategy, it’s very important to consider first and foremost, to prepare in the development space, the introduction of PAT, but always, in my opinion, with a mindset of bringing over to manufacturing operations. And the reason why I insist on this is because there is plenty ways to do PAT and there are plenty mathematical packages or strategic statistical packages, if you will, and PAT platforms that are products that come off the shelf in the market, not all of them have the best features for operations.
And namely the level of customization, the level of effort in software validation comes to my mind. So it’s very important to have comprehensive, deep analysis of what’s the solutions out there and how the organization wants to fit them and where wants to fit them for their particular use case.
And finally, in terms of the operational aspects, well the obvious one is to consider what are the organization’s products, quality parameters, what are the relevant quality parameters? And make the choice of the PAT instruments that are required, get them in place, integrate them with the production assets.
As a last point, to consider is the integration with not only the control systems but even with manufacturing execution systems to reach the peak of value, the maximum value of the technology, which would be getting to real-time release.
Jim: Yeah, it sounds like, you know, oftentimes people want to start with the technology, but what you just described is really starting with the people and work processes and then working your way forward with what you can do and really looking at something built for purpose seems like a very important thing there.
Bruce, let me. Turn it over to you. What is the technology behind DeltaV Spectral PAT?
Bruce: So, you know, as, as Jorge mentioned that there’s a lot of folks that are trying to put this together. And with the advent of these really smart analyzers, spectral analyzers, we’ve seen a lot of these deployed in the process, but it’s a very complex architecture, because there’s computers that are up at the L3 portion of the network, there’s the L2 portion, the data exchanges between the disparate systems.
And so, when we looked at all that, we said, well, what could we do to collapse that architecture and make it easier to deploy? And, that’s how we evolved into our DeltaV Spectral PAT.
So, we now bring the spectral analyzers directly into DeltaV. We bring in the chemometric models that the scientists have developed also into DeltaV. We execute the models then against the spectral array directly in an Application Station on the DeltaV side, and produce the predicted results. So, now we don’t have to worry about multiple computers, multiple validation touchpoints, fragileness of the architecture, because it’s all solidly done at the DeltaV level.
Jim: Well, yeah, that sounds like it simplifies it. Just trying to move data around and make sure it’s in the right format and in a timely way. The network connections are good between sounds like, it’s simplified quite a bit. So Bruce, I guess what PAT instruments can it handle?
Bruce: That’s a great question. Cause that was one of the focuses that we had when we developed a DeltaV Spectral PAT was to make use of OPC UA. And so really any spectral analyzer that can put out its spectral array as an OPC UA floating point array we can consume with DeltaV. So we are not at all specific to the analyzer that’s used.
We can talk to any analyzer that supports OPC UA.
Jim: Well, that’s good. So as long as the supplier has it to the standard of OPC UA, then we can bring it in and process it and do all the stuff we can do with it. Jorge, there are various PAT software platforms in the market. What’s unique or what is the unique value of this solution to the industry?
Jorge: Yeah, so this question is quite linked or to what Bruce said when he introduced DeltaV Spectral PAT solution. It’s an embedded solution. So naturally more simple, more robust, and that enables automated process adjustments and end-point decisions. Both of these have additional value to our customers. And so these are generating a higher return on investment and less risk to operations.
Jim: Interesting. And I guess with AspenTech being our partner and one of the PAT software vendors, is there value or does it make sense in adopting both Aspen Process Pulse and DeltaV Spectral PAT?
Jorge: Absolutely. Absolutely. I normally say that these two products are independently producing value to the end user in different ways for different purposes. I would say Aspen Process Pulse, it’s all about predicting the near future.
So when you’re running the operation using Process Pulse, you have an additional monitoring capability that’s giving you a near future prediction of your process trajectory using a statistical model based on a past data on a number of batches or segments of data if you’re talking about continuous manufacturing it allows for that model to be generated and plotted in, in an operator display, and then projects the current operating conditions versus that representation of the population of the past data that has been made available.
And so it’s allowing the operators to have an additional pair of eyes, let’s say, to help to detect or predict any kind of excursion to quality. and take preventive measures to avoid any process deviation.
Spectrum PAT is more about the hear and now. It’s about the real-time monitoring and immediate response to operating conditions and enables closing the loop between the quality control and the critical process parameters control.
Jim: Well, that does make it sound that they’re complementary and can provide value in doing that.
Bruce, I guess back to the spectral PAT technology, what are the solution requirements and limits?
Bruce: So, we have launched our DeltaV Spectral PAT now with version 15. 15.LTS of DeltaV, and we support both the Sitorius SIMCA Modeling application along with AspenTech’s Unscrambler application for generating the models.
And then, as I mentioned, we would then transfer those models to an Application Station on the DeltaV side, where we would also tie off the spectral analyzers and then using standard function blocks in DeltaV, convert or process that spectral array against the model that we’ve transferred in, in order to generate the desired value.
So, it runs in an application station, version 15 and above of DeltaV, and then from a licensing perspective, it’s done on a per-function block basis. So for each spectral PAT function block, we would license that to run on that Application Station.
Jim: Okay, that sounds easy enough. So for a listener that’s been listening to us for this long and wants to see it in action, can it be demonstrated?
Bruce: Yeah, Jim, we’ve got a couple of things, ways we can demonstrate. So first off, a plug for our new Life Sciences showroom that we have here in our headquarters in Round Rock. We have a Raman Analyzer connected to a two liter bioreactor where we’re measuring the glucose in the bioreactor. We can do that live in front of folks and show how the models can run against the spectral array.
We also have a very similar setup where we’ve got a virtual ramen analyzer and do all of this as a virtual session where you can see the models run against the spectral arrays and even do closed loop control back into DeltaV on the example is a perfusion bioreactor.
Jim: Well, that seems like, something.
Make the trip here to the Austin area to take a look at that. That sounds…
Bruce: Absolutely.
Jim: And Jorge, I guess from a financial perspective, do you have any recommendation to justify such an investment?
Jorge: Yeah, absolutely. So I would suggest to start by defining a strategy, which means start by figuring out what are the company’s key goals?
What are the operational pains to eliminate or to mitigate? What are the targets for affected metrics that are expected to change? Estimate costs, estimate the benefits of the selected solutions, and finally, calculate the return on investment based on the quantification of costs, but also the benefits. And finally, in terms of an approach of a proof of concept.
Yeah, definitely we recommend to start by, a sandbox environment, that you can use as platform to learn, to develop standards and to validate such standards, generating the templates and all the associated necessary applicable compliance documentation. And then use that to instantiate to create any necessary replicas that will be then rolled out to production life systems.
Jim: Yeah, that proof of concept is an important step in the process. After you’ve looked at all the benefits that you can deliver and do that ROI calculation on it. And I guess to wrap things up, Bruce, where can our listeners go to find more information on this important topic of PAT?
Bruce: So you can head right over to the Emerson.com website. We have a dedicated page for DeltaV Spectral PAT on the Emerson.com site. There’s, several videos that you can watch. We’ve got our product data sheet available there. There’s also an eBook that can be downloaded as well as connecting with the proper sales office to get more information and be able to kick the tires with our offering.
Jim: Well, that sounds straightforward enough. And I’ll add a link in the transcript on exactly where the page is. Well, Bruce, Jorge, I want to thank you both so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise with our listeners. So thank you.
Bruce: Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity.
Jorge: Thank you. Same here. It was a pleasure.
La gestión y uso adecuado del aire comprimido es un reto para la industria, sobre todo en la manufactura discreta. Tenemos un invitado especial, Alejandro Jaime Nolasco quien nos compartirá sobre nuevas tecnologías desarrolladas para facilitar a la industria el manejo de su aire comprimido de forma segura y con bajo impacto ambiental.
Conozcamos Aventics, cuyo innovador portafolio de productos ofrece sensores inteligentes con beneficios tanto operativos como en términos de sostenibilidad.
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are important contributors to the manufacturing and production industries. Supporting their equipment through its lifecycle at their customers’ facilities is an essential part of their business success. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems can help them monitor the performance and provide services to keep the equipment operating in top shape.
In this podcast, Evan Jubb joins me to discuss how the DeltaV SaaS SCADA system (formerly known and referred to as the Zedi SaaS SCADA system in this podcast) helps OEMs provide the level of service required to meet and exceed their customers’ expectations.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the DeltaV SaaS SCADA System page on Emerson.com for more on how it can help you improve your business performance.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. This is Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. It’s often been said, do one thing and do it well. Many highly successful brands do this with their products. Think about Nike, totally focused around sports gear, Apple and their great tech products that many of us love and Uber focused around delivery people and food. For them, it’s all about easy, fast delivery as their product they bring to market. So, if you’re an original equipment manufacturer or OEM, it may seem like a no-brainer that in finding the right partners, you can totally focus on delivering your amazing end products that are the right fit for your business and deliver your end customers an exceptional experience.
And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, how to get those quick, painless technology gains. As an OEM, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Evan Jubb, who is Emerson’s Zedi global partner sales manager. But before we get too into the details or just how Emerson can help OEMs quickly and painlessly make these tech gains, Evan, can you tell us a bit about your current role and a bit about your background and experience? Oh, and I almost forgot, I was told you have an interesting background with dog sledding experience too. I’m not quite sure what that’s all about, but it certainly sounds interesting.
Evan: Oh yes, my dog sledding days that, that was fun. It’s great to chat with you, Jim. It’s an honor to be a part of one of your famous podcasts.
As for my background, I hold a bachelor’s degree from the University of Calgary in business. I joined Emerson back in 2016 in a business development role and have had several titles since. Corporate account manager, regional account manager, strategic account executive, and now my focus is on supporting local partners and helping them find solutions for their end customers as manager, global partner sales.
So throughout the years with Emerson, I’ve moved from Calgary to Pittsburgh, then to Houston, and now back in Calgary, Canada. As for the dog sledding, I lived for a winter in Canmore, Alberta and was a dog sledding guide, fuzzy hats, giant mitts, the whole deal. In truth, those dogs were the hardest working colleagues I ever had.
But you know, that job taught me important lessons. How vital it is to take care of your team, understanding their challenges, looking out for every member’s best interests, taking into consideration what may be holding them back. And you know how one lone link can really make or break an entire team that’s working towards something together.
So I find a lot of similarities with, helping our partners and OEMs find the best solutions. Understanding their biggest pain points and how we can help them overcome those obstacles and the struggles they face.
Jim: Well, that sure is a learning curve that most of us never get to experience, especially down here in Texas. I can really see how that would instill that determination in what you bring to people and the solutions, bringing those solutions together to overcome hurdles of any sort. So were you the guy driving the dog sled or did you have another role in helping care for the team of dogs?
Evan: It is all one role. The person that drives the sled is the same person that cares for the dog, making sure they’re healthy fit, giving them that encouragement that they need. And, you know, all the dogs kinda learn to trust each other as well as the driver. So they see me as a part of the team, maybe a leader on the team, but more is just another member that needs to pull his or her weight.
Jim: Well, that is really very cool or freezing cold as the case may be kind of an experience. I can certainly see now the connection and determination to care for help and overcome obstacles. And how that can translate into helping our OEM customers and partners. So, Evan, when you work with OEMs, what does that mean or look like from your angle?
Like who are those types of Emerson customers and what are some of the obstacles they face that you hear most often? And just throw another question in there. What do you do to help make it so painless to successfully adopt new technologies to help their business?
Evan: Well, I know for sure that defining exactly what an OEM looks like can certainly be casting a wide net and it’s a bit confusing. So for clarity, let me explain first up just a little bit about Zedi. The Zedi IIoT platform really boils down to connecting anything, so any device asset to anyone that is authorized to access this data. So that’s anytime, anywhere. And what that translates into is that we work with pretty much any industry and any OEM, we can get their remotely-located equipment or asset data to them in a format that makes sense, is easy to understand, flexible with their business needs and growth.
And always provide them the most up-to-date version of our software as a service. So as for who our OEM customers are, that’s a wide variety. Everything from sugar product producers, food and beverage producers, tank producers, suppliers, packaging producers, companies that treat hydrocarbons, I mean, the list goes on.
So we’ve really worked in lots of different industries, but one of the funner ones was we worked with a slushy drink producer and resellers to make sure that the slushy drink machines were always working on warm in summer days. So definitely a little bit different for us, but an exciting one. So certainly a wide array of products and services as part of an OEM customer offering.
The overall picture is that we are, of course, all industrial focused verticals. What instantly comes to, like many of the challenges to overcome could be the products safety and making sure that it’s effective.
Jim: Well, I guess there are tons of little kids and well, even some adult kids like myself out there in super hot summer regions that can be quickly disappointed if their favorite slushy flavor is outta stock or that machine isn’t working quite right. So that’s great to hear we’re helping out in those areas.
So how about some other more detailed examples of OEMs you work with that benefit from the production data Zedi delivers?
Evan: Oh, sure. Zedi is one particular OEM that’s a lubricant oil and fluid production company in the Northeast that has several end customers all across North America.
One of the largest customers producing a vast amount of steel made in the U.S. So that anywhere connection to their actual analytics about things like tank volumes, levels, temperatures, has been a game changer for them and their customers too. Today, they’re able to make sure their end customers have proof of the level of product used from the tanks for accurate invoicing, on-time ordering, scheduling, and now even the ability to shut off at set temperatures to increase safety for everyone.
They especially have great outcomes for enabling their end customers with the data they want and need. So while increasing internal communications from data and decreasing end customer stress with better scheduling, refills, and always just kind of knowing exact levels of products in their tanks.
So I really like that one. They’re a great customer to have. Another example of one of our OEMs is a packaging manufacturer, so they reached out to us when their business really started to take off a few years ago. Initially, they were having lots of difficulties trying to keep up with demand. They didn’t really have enough staff like most companies today. Couldn’t find the right skilled workers that they needed. But it was important for them to know certain set points of their production process.
They also want the flexibility to change what the data they were getting based on that process. So they wanted vibration data sets for one instance in their production. The next hour they wanted a wide range of whole different set of data for three different buildings over to get the right statistics on product delivery times and track scheduling correctly. It was our ability to be flexible that was significantly helping them overcome those challenges and even thrive with the added technology.
So there’s so many different types of OEMs that produce products everyone needs. But the one thing is that for sure, that no matter what you are producing or where you produce it, we can help you securely get the data you need to the right people at the right time.
Jim: Well, that’s a pretty wide range of customer examples, so it seems like Zedi isn’t really locked into just one segment or product type or even industry. That’s really fascinating.
Generally speaking though, what are the biggest obstacles you’ve helped with through the years for all those different types of OEMs? Is there any pattern to what their biggest challenges are, or is it really all over the board?
Evan: Yeah, Jim, there’s some very clear patterns and areas of obstacles that our OEMs are faced with on a regular basis. Mainly things they need help with are addressing improvements on actionable data that can help them make better business decisions.
So things like inventory tracking, product usage, mapping, producing downtime and increased safety for their products and their people, and ultimately their end users. So one thing that I think that usually stands out that most, the need of the data that presents actionable insights is that it needs to be easy to understand and really clear to the end users that are looking at it.
They don’t need a ton of data. They just need the right data for their role. So what’s relevant to their part of the business is what’s important and what’s gonna enable them to make decisions quicker, better, faster.
Jim: Yeah, that’s a really important point about the sea of data out there, getting the right data to the right person in order something actionable to be able to improve performance.
So in the bigger picture, they need technology like the Zedi IIoT platform to help them build greater efficiencies to help them increase their sustainability performance and profitability. Why do you think these are such big challenges for OEMs? Is it the difficulties in hiring supply chain or something else that they face?
I almost wonder if it’s the technology itself that can sometimes become a challenge to implement. I. If that’s not their core business or product focus to begin with. I think that all too often it’s easy for tech companies to assume a lot about their end customers and users that they can quickly forget the level of time planning and understanding that has to go into creating these types of efficiencies.
I know it can get pretty in-depth and for sure eat up a ton of internal resource time, just trying to make sense of it all. Much less actually getting things stood up and operating with the new technology to even begin with to help them. Would you say that’s fair or perhaps it’s a bit of a loaded question, but maybe you can shed some light on those types of difficulties OEMs often face.
Evan: No, Jim, you, you completely hit the nail on the head. It’s so true. Often the OEMs we work with not only vary in size, but they may lack internal resources, budgets, and abilities to really get new technology up and running. After all, it’s not their core business. Their core business is mostly about their end product quality and keeping their customers happy. In some cases, the service that comes with the product. But not only are they challenged with limited staff, they’re fearful to carve out the time internally to make these types of technology projects or changes and figure out how to implement them. So this is where finding the right partnership relationship is so important to OEMs.
The common denominator is usually based around making sure we know what we’re doing and we have the longevity to be there for them. There’s no worse experience than putting a ton of research and time into a project then six months later the partner turns out not to be committed. There happens when they don’t provide regular security updates. They aren’t willing to update their functions or offer support or training. Or offer training to new people or yes, you know, worse, they charge for things like support or update patches that aren’t even helping their business or their security.
We’ve worked with OEMs that are a bit shy because of these types of bad experiences Before. You know, the great news is for that search for your long-term, reliable, innovative company to partner with that will fully support your business growth and staff. It’s exactly what Emerson has to offer. The Zedi IIoT platform releases between 12 to 30 updates every year. Mainly security related, but also development for functions and abilities of customers and our customers and OEMs need and want to help increase their overall production, safety, & profitability. And probably most importantly, there’s sustainability.
So some of the other biggest challenges OEMs often face are like inventory control management, financial concerns across the board. You know, to get that strong ROI quickly is important to them. They need seamless workflows to help ease the stress of the staff that they’re lucky enough to have, and they want to enable those employees with fast decision making through analytics and actionable data to make their jobs easier while providing companies better results. That’s what we’re really hopeful to do. And of course, there’s tons of other challenges that they’re wanting to conquer and easily can.
Like scheduling, deliveries based of usage, internal communication to make sure everyone that needs to know something, knows it, and even the ability to provide proof to end customers of quality and usage as well. So communicating results to customers is key to them even being able to drive more repeatable business.
Jim: Yeah. There are so many important points you made there, that one about being with somebody that’s with you for the long haul. And it’s not all work done at once. It’s over the lifecycle that they need there, and then as getting into it, that analytics around what you need, what they need, what their customers need to do better.
So how does Emerson make these types of transitions through technology painless?
Evan: Yeah, we, we do our best to make it painless and to take advantage of the new technology ’cause we do offer all the things that OEM wants in a long-term partnership.
We have complete and ongoing training resources. Full twenty-four-seven live human support included. All while offering additional services like alarm management, machine health monitoring, and even project management. So, you know, getting things up and running quickly doesn’t need to absorb a bunch of internal resources that are already pretty stressed out with their roles.
Jim: Well, that sure sounds like every base is covered than to actually be painless and fast to start getting all that rich, actionable data quickly. So how does all this really impact successful outcomes from the OEM’s perspective?
Evan: No, I think one of the biggest game-changing outcomes is really built around the fact that each person on the staff gains access to knowing exactly what they need to know, no matter if it’s in the middle of the night or thousands of miles away from the production site.
They can get the exact data each person needs that is relevant to their role without all that other data they don’t need. So another big outcome, success is actually measurable by returns. So how much wasted product is now saved? How many more, fewer hours of people traveling to just check on machines and assets that are working just fine.
How many fewer people can get the same or more product created and sold? How much money is saved from machines and assets set on predictive maintenance schedules that also reduce downtime. There’s tons of ways to measure the successful outcomes of the set of Zedi IIoT platform and SaaS Suite provided.
But I seriously think the biggest one goes back to being trusted. Long-term sustainable partner they can count on that actually knows their stuff, can get them up and running quickly, and is there every step of the journey and hopefully create a more sustainable business model that can be passed along to the next generation of owners.
Jim: I think you’re right on target there, Evan. You’re right; when people have poured their heart and soul into building their products and their business, they do it to have a sustainable outcome for generations to come. I think they wanna see it continue to flourish far beyond their own lifetime and help the next generations of their families and friends and coworkers.
So, yeah. That in itself is a pretty huge outcome, if you ask me. Well, thanks again for joining me today, Evan. It was really great to hear how the Zedi IIoT platform and SaaS Suite deliver painless outcomes for OEMs who want to grow their business using technology as part of the mix. Great stuff. And thanks to all of you who have tuned in to listen to this podcast. We look forward to chatting with you again in the future.
Evan: Thanks for having me on, Jim. Really appreciate it.
-End of transcript-
En este episodio los expertos en instrumentación industrial, Jorge Espinoza y Martín López nos comparten sobre las tecnologías de medición y monitoreo para variables críticas en la industria minera. Exponen sobre los más recientes avances en medición para incrementar la seguridad, la eficiencia y la rentabilidad de los procesos mineros.
Te invitamos a ver o escuchar el episodio completo y suscribirte a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre innovaciones en automatización industrial.
The United States Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) released the final rule from a three-part series known as the “Mega Rule.”
In this podcast, Phani Kanakamedala joins me to discuss the rule’s impact on gas pipeline transporters. He highlights the challenges and the role of automation technology in addressing these regulations while improving overall pipeline performance.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Software for Energy Transportation & Storage on Emerson.com for more information on the advanced pipeline management software to meet these regulatory requirements and operate more safely and efficiently.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA’s mission is to protect people and the environment by advancing the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials that are essential to our daily lives. Today, I’m joined by Emerson’s Phani-Kanakamedala, and we’ll be discussing PHMSA’s Mega Rule, which comes in three parts concerning pipeline safety regulations for gas gathering, and gas transmission pipelines. Welcome, Phani.
Phani: Hi, Jim. And thank you for the introduction. And happy to be here.
Jim: Well, it’s great having you here. So, let’s jump into things by asking you to share with our listeners your background and path to your current role here at Emerson.
Phani: Sure. Like Jim said, I’m part of Emerson’s automation solutions group, and I’m a product manager in our midstream pipeline simulation offering, software offerings. My background is I’m a computer science engineer with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Computer Science. Specialization is in software development applications. I joined Emerson in 2008. And I think in a couple of days, it’s gonna be my 16th anniversary with Emerson. And all these 16 years I’ve been associated with pipeline simulation software. And for about 10 years of these 16 years, I was a software developer; actually, in the last six years or so, I’ve been a product manager working with our stakeholders, industry experts, and customers closely in terms of serving the pipeline industry here.
Jim: Well, that’s great. Sixteen years. Doesn’t time really fly? And that nice background on both the technology side of it and then on the marketing and customer interaction roles. So, that’s a nice, broad, and varied background, it should be really good for our conversation here. So, can you provide some insights into the pipeline incidents, you know, that may have led up to this Mega Rule that we’re talking about? And I’m thinking of things such as the Pacific Gas and Electric Company rupture in San Bruno in 2010. And I guess all this is a trigger for the Mega Rule.
Phani: Absolutely, Jim. It’s always a good context to discuss what started all of this and then to understand the motivation. And so, as you will hear in the podcast, you’ll see that some of the motivation of these rulings originated from that event, if you will, and the learnings from that event. So, here we have PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric pipeline company, it was operating a gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, and there was a huge explosion, you know, and that resulted in killing about eight folks, eight people. And there was a big event, a huge explosion; there was a shockwave coming out of the explosion that was equal to the magnitude of 1.1 earthquake, an earthquake of that magnitude, just a pipeline explosion causing it.
And people could see a Fireball from more than 1000 feet in the air. So, it was a pretty big event and a residential area, the neighborhood just two miles near the explosion, and hence, you know, the casualties in terms of folks and property, etc. So, this was a pretty significant event. I would say this event was one of the prime triggers, if you will of the regulation and also action from Congress, you know, to bring in regulation on pipeline operations and so forth. There is also another event, but it’s more of a lesser extent, it was also a rupture of a crude pipeline, probably, a liquid pipeline. But I think for all intents and purposes, the San Bruno event with the PG&E pipeline was the main trigger.
Jim: Well, it sounds like yeah, that was a really tragic, catastrophic event. So, how did the lessons learned from past pipeline incidents such as this one and others influence the development of the Mega Rule? And I guess starting with the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, or ANPRM, in 2011, and in what ways does it address the specific challenges identified in those incidents?
Phani: Absolutely. So, as you said, you know, in August 2011, you know, because of congressional directives, PHMSA came up with this Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, ANPRM, to revise pipeline safety regulations for gas gathering and gas transmission pipelines. And there were a lot of comments received with this, the rulemaking. And specifically, the rule primarily was concerned about maximum operating pressure, and integrating management near high-consequence areas for onshore gas transmission pipelines.
That was a direct result of what happened with the PG&E event to gas pipeline. And they were operating with operating pressures which exceeded the grade of the pipeline on the parts of the pipeline, you know, to meet their customer demands and the needs if you will. So, that part of that was directly related to the PG&E event with maximum operating pressure. Similarly, integrity management near high-consequence areas, like we just talked about earlier, it was right next to a residential area. Unfortunately, we had casualties. And then so that is where the integrity management in terms of high-consequence areas came out of that as well. And like I said, there was a lot of comments, a lot of feedback, and it kind of initiated the splitting of the rulemaking into three parts, if you will.
Jim: Yes. So, I guess with all these comments coming in from industry on the proposed changes, and I guess, stakeholders involved in that, too, how did that all factor into the finalization of the Mega Rule?
Phani: Absolutely. For any rulemaking, I mean, the feedback process is very important. And that’s usually the standard practice for PHMSA and even any regulation. So, the final regulation was largely a product of negotiations with a diverse group of stakeholders, including industry, citizen groups, and industry trade groups. So, they were not just talking to pipeline operators, but also different stakeholders in terms of reaching a broad acceptance in many quarters.
And some of the… They cannot keep everybody happy, at the same time, they wanted to come up with a balanced rulemaking that would somewhat satisfy most of the stakeholder requirements. And all of these requirements kind of came into effect in 2023, May ’24, especially the phase three of the Mega Rule, but it was definitely a long drawn-out process for sure.
Jim: So, I guess, considering some of these historical incidents, how has the Mega Rule addressed the need for enhanced real-time monitoring within control room applications, I guess, to prevent and respond promptly, to potential leaks and ruptures?
Phani: Yeah. That’s a great question. The Mega Rule kind of addresses different aspects, if you will. There is integrity management with high-consequence areas, there is hardware, you know, the grade of, you know, how good are the pipeline, and what maximum operating pressure can you operate the pipeline with. Should they have valving to control or mitigate ruptures, if you will. And there is also corrosion control, which also could end up with rupture. And there is also change management, in terms of how do they change or repair pipelines, and how do they report that. And so, there were different aspects of these aspects of the Mega Rule and out of which one was also defining rupture detection and asking for compliance with detecting ruptures. And for the first time, PHMSA actually defined rupture in some quantifiable format. It is 10% pressure drop within 15 minutes. So, while the talk about rupture has been there since 2011, finally there was some sort of a metric.
Now, once that KPI was, you know, shared and published as part of the rulemaking, there was also some ambiguity with it. Is the 10% pressure drop in one location? Is it in multiple locations across? And so there was also that ambiguity there as well, where however, I think that is the aspect of the Mega Rule where the pipelines, both gas and liquid, are needed to comply to detecting 10% pressure drops or ruptures within that timeframe. The gas pipelines traditionally, haven’t been regulated that well, that actually…Mega Rule actually brought almost 400,000 miles of unregulated gathering lines and onshore gas lines into the compliance world. Liquid pipelines were traditionally well-regulated. And they usually have the CPM systems. That is where the need for, you know, detection and CPM systems have come into play with the Mega Rule making.
Jim: Yeah. It sounds like you hit on corrosion monitoring, an important part in that. And that really bringing gas pipelines into the fold. So, with the Mega Rule, and its impact on gas pipeline, I guess, how does the Mega Rule impact gas pipelines? And is there any difference in adaption compared to regulations for liquid pipelines?
Phani: Absolutely. I mean, as I was saying earlier, traditionally, crude pipelines were more regulated, there was clear regulation for need of CPMs or, you know, leak detection monitoring systems on, you know, transmission lines, especially if they are going through high-consequence areas, you know, and residential, environmentally sensitive areas, etc., etc. Gas pipelines haven’t been regulated to that extent. So, typically, gas pipelines did not have systems on them to monitor. To an extent, even not enough instrumentation to be able to.
So the liquid pipelines were always well equipped to comply with the Mega Rule. They had better tools in their repertoire, if you will, versus the gas pipelines. And that is where the gas pipelines were kind of brought in front, the regulation was brought in front. And with the PG&E event being gas rupture as well, that is where the Mega Rule is making a significant impact in terms of compliance and regulation.
Jim: So, are the gas pipelines well-equipped? And, I guess what are the next steps for them to be better positioned for the future in compliance with the regulations?
Phani: Absolutely. I mean, that’s a very good question, follow-up question here too because equipment, you know, instrumentation is a very important piece of the puzzle to get any monitoring system working. So, meaning you need real-time instrumentation, which can read and transmit real-time measurements to a SCADA system, DCS system, auto control room where the monitoring applications and systems could leverage that information and provide real-time or near real-time, leak detection, rupture detection, etc.
So, given the nature of the gas pipelines, they are pretty large, nested, and loopy, if you wanna say, and lot of unmetered junctions. So, there’s a lot of activity going on. And also, the nature of the gas pipelines is the pressure changes are quite drastic compared to a liquid pipeline, hence the need of the instrumentation. It’s just not the need of the instrumentation, but also the quality of the instrumentation, the quality and the precision of the instrumentation is also often higher. And traditionally, gas pipelines, even now, to this day, they don’t have that sort of equipment or instrumentation.
So, that would be the first step is for every gas pipeline operator to review their instrumentation and identify where do they lack necessary instrumentation. I even had chats with some of the operators where they know they’re losing containment and it’s just that is something that was not a big concern of theirs, given a small leak was okay, in terms of loss of product or fuel. But in this day and age and going forward, that would definitely be something that they need to analyze, work on, and get instrumentation on for them to be able to have these CPM or real-time monitoring systems being able to work and do their job.
Jim: Yeah. With compressed gas and pressure measurement it’s very important to be able to spot, you know, where you may have leaks or worse, ruptures to really get rid of that. So, I guess the Emerson software solutions beyond just the measurements for leak detection, that are widely used by the industry. Can you describe the PipelineManager Suite? I know we have a broad portfolio of solutions that address these needs.
Phani: Absolutely. Like I said, Emerson has a suite of products on the hardware side too, with the equipment, measurements, sensors, etc. But at the same time, we also have a suite of applications that can address all the needs in the Mega Rule once the equipment is in the place. So, be it detecting 10% pressure drop, or 15 minutes or even higher requirements of sensitivity, that is something our suite of applications can do. So we have an audit team, which can detect leaks, which are as small as 0.5% or less of the normal flow rate of the pipeline, or even detect ruptures, which are 10% or even more than 10%, obviously. We also have rupture…specialized rapture detection products, which could detect those ruptures within two minutes.
I mean, the regulation is calling out for 15 minutes, we think it’s too slow, a big rupture of let’s say, a 20% or higher flow rate of the pipe…or higher pressure drop, let me put it that way, should be directed even much quicker, because 15 minutes, I think, a lot of things can happen in 15 minutes. So, that’s a lot of time, right? So, we have products that are well placed even in the future, in terms of rupture detection, in terms of reliability, and being able to have quick response, and mitigation teams deployed when such events do happen. Also, some of these obligations and suite obligations are not something new, they have been here for decades, and we have a vast amount of experience detecting and identifying leaks under various topologies and different parts of the world. And that is what we offer and that’s part of the suite for software applications here.
Jim: Well, that sounds like a broad thing. And I think you’re right, I think especially with gas, you know, combustible, 15 minutes is a really long time. So, the quicker you can identify it and take the necessary steps, including if you need to stop the flow right then and there that you can do that kind of thing. I guess I can imagine visualization is really important and advantageous in leak detection. I guess how much granularity can be achieved with this, and why is it important, especially for compliance with the Mega Rule?
Phani: Yeah. Visualization is something that is incredibly important in terms of analysis of leak detection and rupture detection, because as pipeline operators, we understand that there are certain limitations with instrumentation on certain pipelines, and that could trigger certain false alarms and etc. And that kind of causes some issues to corrupt with the other pipeline. And that’s just a, you know, practical problem that our pipeline operators deal with.
Now, with the regulation, and the fast response, it’s mandating, it’s important for them to be able to timely analyze and achieve the balance between, do I just shut the pipeline off immediately while I know that it could be a false alarm? Versus how do I comply while I do that, and not lose productivity? So, that is a fine balance. And that is where the visualization comes into play. You know, if this is something in a high-consequence area, the alarm is, you know, the response could be in one way much more harsher. Versus it’s a less consequence area, there are all kinds of risks, tools that, you know, engineering management suite of applications provide as part of Emerson. So they can do all that analysis and have all that visual tools in their hands to be able to respond appropriately on different pipelines and in what areas they are and the need of the hour.
Jim: Yeah. I can see that getting the visualization component there to be able to react quickly to what needs to be done to mitigate the situation. I guess looking forward, how does the Mega Rule contribute to a culture of continuous improvement in pipeline safety, to prevent future incidents? And what role does real-time monitoring play in this effort, I guess, overall, with the monitoring, and what is the outlook for further legislation in this space?
Phani: That is a very good question. And this is something we routinely engage in discussions with different pipeline operators, ranging from pretty large companies to mid and small, and mid-range companies, pipeline companies. There is a lot of anticipation about what is in works. For example, methane emissions, you know, is something that is very serious, to be considered by the government. And there are more rulemakings coming in and, you know, natural gas leaks will contribute to methane emissions.
And how does the rulemaking come into effect where that’s gonna impact detection and reporting? There are various ways detection of gas pipeline specifically happens. So, our CPM systems typically fall under internal detection systems, meaning they are looking at what’s happening inside the pipeline, trying to assimilate using the real-time measurements, and finding anomalies, leaks, etc. So, there’s already external detection methods like, you got satellite imagery, you got flyovers, you got walk-throughs, etc., etc., to do that. And they are often costly, they are not cost-effective compared to an internal system. The internal detection systems, typically, it’s a one-time cost, and then whatever that takes to manage that versus external systems are, that is a continuous.
Both systems are continuous monitoring, but you will be paying more for an external system as a service, for example, versus a software detecting leaks and ruptures. So, that is definitely something every pipeline operator is considering. What is the quality of service and regulation compliance that the internal detection systems, CPM systems are giving me versus these other systems existing out there, and the cost-effectiveness of it and taking into account very well, the future regulations coming into it, and which of these systems are best placed and suited to comply with these. Fortunately, this is a conversation that is happening and all pipeline companies are preparing for these future changes, and aligning themselves, and being best prepared to be able to comply with this rulemaking.
Jim: Yeah. And it just seems like the internal continuous monitoring enables things like predictive maintenance when you can see something starting to go awry and maybe be able to deal with it instead of after the fact. You know, dealing with whatever happened, that leak or rupture or anything in there. So yeah, it seems like the difference between inspection and paying continuously for that at one time, putting in the sensors, the software, everything else to run the analytics, just to make sure you’re operating as safely and optimized as much as possible. That seems like a good way to go. And it seems like the regulations gonna kind of move it that way, anyway, over time.
Well, this has been a very enlightening discussion, and our listeners, you can go and visit the pipeline integrity management solutions section on emerson.com for more on some of the things we talked about here today, and more. And I’ll add a link to Software for Energy Transportation & Storage in the transcript to make it easy for you to find or just search on Pipeline Integrity Management and Emerson, and you’ll find more there.
Well, Phani, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and experience with our listeners.
-End of transcript-
For pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical manufacturers, the data that accompanies the production is as critical as what is being produced. The integrity of this data is paramount for the successful release of the products for sale that comply with all regulatory requirements.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Michalle Adkins and Hilary Mills-Baker join me to discuss the challenges of achieving the required data integrity and solutions to drive performance improvements.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Life Sciences and Medical section on Emerson.com for more on the technologies and solutions to help you drive data integrity improvements in your manufacturing operations.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. This is Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Data integrity is still a hot topic in the life science industry. We’ll be discussing that here today, and I’m thankful to be joined. By Michalle Adkins and Hilary Mills-Baker, who in fact just did a webinar on this topic in late 2023.
Welcome, Michalle and Hilary.
Michalle: Thanks, Jim.
Hilary: Hi, Jim.
Jim: Hey, it’s great having you both. I guess to get things kicked off, Michalle, can you give us a little bit of your background and path to your current role here at Emerson?
Michalle: Sure. Thanks Jim. I started out my career at Merck after graduating from the Penn State University with chemical engineering degree, and I worked in the instrumentation and automation department.
Spent some time. Doing automation support as well. And then I worked in manufacturing in for purification and formulation in a vaccine manufacturing. I also did scheduling and planning. Then I wound up starting out at Emerson in a consulting group and supported. MES and DeltaV-related consulting manage the team of consultants, and I’m currently the director of our life sciences strategy.
I’m looking after where the industry is going, the direction and how we develop technologies to support the future direction of the industry.
Jim: Well, that’s a great wide background with a lot of experience in there. Hilary, your turn. Give us a little bit about your background and path to where you are today at Emerson.
Hilary: Oh, thanks Jim. Well, I started doing a board-based engineering degree and a master’s in quality engineering, back in the 80s. And I was sponsored by a company called Courtaulds, and I worked for them in their control and instrumentation department. And I moved into Emerson because I wanted to do more systems-based work and get into automation.
So I started with Emerson in 1990. We were using Provox at the time, but we now, you know, I moved into projects with DeltaV and I was lead engineer on those, some of those projects. And we were heavily involved in the nuclear industry, sort of another regulated industry. By two thousands, we were doing a lot of pharmaceutical projects out of the U.K. And I moved into supporting the validation activities because as a supplier we want to be able to align with our customer in terms of validation and make sure we understand their quality requirements. And so over the years, I’ve set a department up in Europe of quality and validation engineers computer system validation engineers.
So that we can support our customers on life science projects and make sure that we’re really building quality in right from the start of the automation.
Jim: Well, that’s really great to have all this experience here all together. So let’s dive into the topic of data integrity. Michalle, let’s start with a concise definition. What is data integrity?
Michalle: Well, Jim, I would say in short, data integrity is about completeness, consistency, and accuracy of data. And then more specifically, there’s a abbreviation or acronym that is often used to describe data integrity, and that is ALCOA+, which stands for data that is attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original, an accurate or true copy. And then the plus part is really going into complete, consistent, enduring, available, and retrievable as well.
Jim: Well, I’m glad they made an acronym out of it ’cause that’s a mouthful of things to try to track down there. So let’s dig into that a little more. Hilary, why is data integrity of such paramount importance in the life sciences industry?
Hilary: Wow. I think you just caught it, Jim. All of those words, all of those things that we’re trying to make sure we’re building into data actually makes data integrity quite difficult to achieve. On the other hand, data is all that our Life Science customers have to use to say whether a batch of medicine is suitable to be released to the public so that we can consume it and hopefully get well. So, you know, if we had a, a poor batch of medicine that could be harmful to somebody or it might not treat their life-threatening condition. All that we have is this data integrity to tell us if it’s right or wrong.
And so it’s a, a really important tool. And because of that, if a company is found by the regulators to have poor data integrity, that they’re not managing well, and hence could inadvertently release poor, poor quality medicine, the consequences to that drug manufacturer can be things like product recalls, loss of reputation, because they’ve got a warning letter from the regulator. And there can be financial consequences as well in falling share price and lack of sales. So I said data integrity is hard to achieve. Just give you a few examples of the sorts of things that can go wrong. Let’s say while a batch is being manufactured, we’re collecting data that will be used for batch release manually. So, you know, we all know we can write the wrong number down or we can forget to do it, or even that those records could be falsified.
So that’s why data integrity in a manual environment can be difficult. So one FDA warning letter, FDA is a regulator in the US found evidence of an employee apparently verifying that tasks have been done on a day that he wasn’t even in work. And so, you know, it’s easy to falsify records if you have a mind to.
Conversely, we also have data that’s generated by a computerized system like DeltaV during manufacturing. And that can be incorrect because maybe the system wasn’t tested properly in the first place, so the software’s doing something wrong. Or we’ve got untrained people logged on being allowed to generate data and not really knowing how to do that properly. So, data integrity is hard to achieve. Also, we need have it right. So, a big, important topic.
Jim: Wow. I think you highlighted the stakes of making sure it’s done properly. So Michalle, what are some key points that companies should remember when it comes to data integrity?
Michalle: Well, I’m thinking about the comment that Hilary just made regarding the example with technology and I often when I talk to people, I have to remind them or we work through the fact that it is more than just about technology. Yes, technology can be an important piece of how you’re managing data integrity, but we have to remember that we’re managing the data throughout the entire lifecycle, the data lifecycle, a product lifecycle, and this is going to include things like governance and management and procedural and technical controls, as well as other human factors.
So it’s about company culture also. It’s about people and how they perform their work. It’s about work processes. All of this, in addition to the technology and frankly, management really sets the tone. And there have to be procedures in place to be followed.
There need to be reviews, there’s change management. All of these kinds of things are, are covered in the governance and management processes and those procedural and technical controls, and they’re all really an important piece. Each one is an important piece of the data integrity puzzle.
Jim: Wow. That sounds like it, that you’re right, it’s so much more than just the technology. And I guess before we start talking about the technology then, is there anything else we should note about data integrity?
Michalle: I would say that one key thing to note is, you know, we generate a huge amount of data. And so maybe not all that data actually falls under GxP or GMP, GLP regulations, so we only really need to ensure that the data categories, which represent the needs for regulatory compliance. So data that’s supporting regulatory compliance, GMP processes, GxP processes, that those are properly managed to ensure data integrity from a regulatory perspective that is.
Jim: Well that’s sounds like some good news is not all that data needs to be captured in part of the data integrity process. So I guess now let’s move on to technology and Hilary, let me turn this over to you. Do you have some initial thoughts in the technology realm?
Hilary: Well, yes, I think firstly it’s important to understand that the FDA, the regulator in the US, really encouraging the use of technology. So data integrity can be supported by technology, and we can see big advances in quality.
You know, really helping to reduce errors, optimising resources, and using technology because of those factors. Also reducing risk to the person taking the drug at the end of the day. So the FDA has recognised the potential for these technologies to provide significant benefits to the industry. So in a world where, okay, maybe we could still do everything manually, we definitely being encouraged to do things using, supported by good technology.
Jim: Well, that’s good. Technology does play an important role in that because that’s some of the things we do here at Emerson. So, speaking of Emerson technologies, Hilary, how do they address the data in integrity questions?
Hilary: Michalle used that acronym ALCOA+, and so I’m going to just give you a few examples of how our system DeltaV is designed to actually build data integrity into the data that’s generated during a batch when a batch of material is actually being produced. So let’s just take a examples. So that first A in ALCOA+ stands for attributable.
And the regulations are telling us we must know who generated or changed the data. And so within DeltaV there is a mechanism that’s recording actions and events all the time along with the identity of the operator who may be involved. So for instance, if a valve gets open during production, which could cause some sort of issue to what’s actually being produced, we will know that.
We will know when that happened, and we will know who did that activity. And that can be very important when investigating whether a batch is good to be released or not. The next one of the letters of ALCOA+ list that we’re going to look at is contemporaneous. So dates must be recorded, contemporaneously at the time the event occurred.
And again, DeltaV systems are designed to be NTP compatible. They use the network time protocol, a standard communication protocol that allows computers to synchronize with a time server across a network. So this means any timestamps that are being put against the data, we know they’re going to be accurate to the master time that’s being used in the area.
Just one more example. Data must be accurate. You know, it sounds like that’s a given, doesn’t it? But data can be inaccurate for many, many reasons. So DeltaV is really reliant on all of the input sensor data coming from across the plant. And we do provide within DeltaV asset management, which can be used to make sure those sensors, those devices have been maintained well and so are giving us good input data to work with that’s accurate. So just a few of the examples, Jim, I could go on.
Jim: Well, I think you described very well the attributable, contemporaneous, and accurate in there. Well, Michalle, let me turn it over to you. Are there other technologies to highlight?
Michalle: Sure. I think one that I will highlight is MES, our manufacturing execution systems.
These solutions are also a great way to capture data with context to ensure data integrity. So our DeltaV MES solution, which was formerly called Syncade, is also a great technology for capturing data. Contemporaneously and with context, and then additionally, because of the nature of MES, there are other mechanisms in place to ensure that the data is complete, accurate, legible, and attributable as well.
Finally, of course, the, the system itself has been designed with regulatory compliance in mind so that you can find some white papers and other information regarding electronic signatures, electronic records, et cetera, which are, are, are also very relevant to this topic.
Jim: Well, those technologies sound like very helpful and all of data integrity.
Hilary, do you have any other thoughts on the technology front?
Hilary: Yeah, I think our DeltaV system has the necessary data integrity functionality to be compliant to the regulations. But really I think that DeltaV product or indeed the DeltaV MES product, that’s just a platform that we start to work on during a project when we’re supplying customization of that system to be able to manufacture a particular supplier manufacturers drugs. So DeltaV itself, or Syncade itself is the foundation and data integrity built in. But then we have to customize that and the regulations make it very clear that during that process, computer system validation underpins data integrity. So making sure that you’ve got the right designs, that you’re implementing the code well, and that you’re testing it properly is all very important to make sure that the data at the end of the day is correct.
So within Emerson’s project teams, we have specialists, validation specialists who can work with the customers to align to their specific validation strategy. Trying to make sure that it’s absolutely lean, the lean validation, but it’s good validation. So we don’t want to have repeats of testing on during the project and on site. We want to maximize leverageability of the work Emerson has done.
But, we also want the computer system validation to have been done correctly. So that’s one way in that actually, you know, using the systems, making sure they’re being used in the right way is a good starting point. That helps data integrity. And finally I’d like to say that during our project project execution, Emerson is developing electronic project execution tools that are going to help improve the quality and consistency of that final delivered DeltaV system, and all of its supporting documentation.
So again, all of that is supporting this concept of data integrity.
Jim: Well, I think you’ve really described the lifecycle of data integrity from this project phase you were talking about through continuous operations in there. I guess Michalle, one other quick question. You noted the ALCOA+, but I’ve heard something about FAIR, the F-A-I-R data principle. How does that compare?
Michalle: You know, that’s a really good question. I’ve had some interesting conversations along the way, just about that very topic. Well, first of all, I would say that FAIR, it stands for Findable Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable and FAIR was really bred out of the R&D data infrastructure needs that are required for associated metadata and capture and storage of that data.
The ALCOA+ principles were really more specific to data that’s associated with quality testing and manufacturing processes in order to ensure data integrity and to document actions properly and document processes and the data associated with all the activities in, again, manufacturing and quality testing.
There’s certainly a bit of overlap with ALCOA+ and FAIR, since Findable and Accessible of FAIR actually relate to the available and retrieval of ALCOA+. So it’s kind of a similar concept. And then while Interoperable and Reusable are also related to enduring, so you can see there’s a lot of overlap there.
So essentially, I would say that both ALCOA+ and FAIR are important principles for data integrity. They just have a little bit of a different origin or focus.
Jim: Well, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I hope our listeners have learned as much today as I have. I feel that, at least on the data integrity front, I’m smarter than I was a few minutes ago before we started with all this.
For our listeners, if you do a search on Emerson Life Sciences or Emerson Life Sciences and Medical, we have a reference to the webinar, the white papers, and a whole lot more information about these topics and more in making sure that your data integrity is as high as it can be and satisfies the needs of the regulatory bodies and everything else.
So Michalle and Hilary, thank y’all so much for joining us today.
Hilary: Thank you. Thanks, Jim.
Michalle: Thanks Jim. It was great to be here today.
-End of transcript-
Objectives need their measurements to understand the progress being made. The organization CDP runs an environmental impact disclosure program that allows global companies, governments, and other organizations to manage their environmental impacts.
Emerson Chief Sustainability Officer Mike Train joins me to discuss Emerson’s progress as measured through the CDP program and ways it’s helping its customers drive their environmental performance.
Give the podcast a listen, visit the CDP site to learn more, and visit the Environmental Sustainability section on Emerson.com for more on Emerson’s commitment to driving environmental sustainability improvements.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Today, we’ll be discussing recognition of Emerson’s actions to improve the sustainability of its global operations, as well as that of our suppliers and customers. Today, I am joined by Emerson’s Chief Sustainability Officer Mike Train, to discuss the progress Emerson is making on our path to Net Zero and the work of organizations like the CDP to help assess this progress.
Welcome Mike.
Mike: Hey Jim. Good to be with you.
Jim: Well, it’s great to have you. I know we did one of these in the past, and I look forward to our conversation here today. Well, I heard Emerson recently received a rating from the CDP, which, as I understand it, is a not-for-profit charity that runs the global disclosure system for investors, companies, cities, states, and regions to manage their environmental impacts.
Can you tell our listeners a little more about this organization and their mission?
Mike: Yeah, sure. Jim, the CDP has been around now for a couple of decades and is really the leading environmental disclosure system in the world. I think there’s over 20,000 companies or something now that, report information through the CDP platform.
We at Emerson have been reporting for a long time, since 2010, and have worked our way through to being kind of fully using the platform and all the guidance that’s built into it for how to run a better or best-practice environmental program.
Jim: I understand we have an A- rating with the CDP, so what does that signify for our organization’s climate change efforts, and how does it align with our broader sustainability objectives?
Mike: Yeah, no. Very pleased to receive our rating again this year of an A minus.
It represents that we have a very strong program. We have very full disclosure. We have a set of targets that we report to. We’ve done some of the work like climate scenario analysis and planning for the future. Kind of all of those great elements that are built into CDP. So very much appreciate the rating.
And I think for us, it represents a few things. One is the CDP rating is something that we kind of rally around in the company. It helps bring all of our stakeholders together for conversations. It helps, again, guide our improvement actions over time.
Given that that they rate and they share it with the world, it gives you a good sense of our leadership now in the environmental sustainability areas. I’d say it’s also supportive of conveying to a wide set of stakeholders, our customers, our suppliers, our investors, communities that we operate in, that we are committed to a very strong environmental sustainability program. We’re making our own contribution and, you know, we’re part of that larger dialogue in the world about how we get to a net zero world, if you will, in the future.
You know, through that CDP reporting mechanism, we share, again, targets that I mentioned. Our company has net zero targets, for example, in GHG emissions. With a near-term set of targets around 2030 to get to net zero operations, our footprint, our scope, one or two activities, and a longer-term, 2045, inclusive of our value chain net zero. So I think again, the CDP kind of built in all of the best approaches. They fully sort of embraced the TCFD (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures) recommendations for how to manage environmental activities. And, it’s a great signal, that we’re on the right track, I think, to working the things that we need to do.
We still have many things to do in the future. We’re still very focused, obviously, on making our reductions, making investments to make reductions, and also participating through our portfolio in a lot of the activities that the world’s counting on to make the improvement in our collective roadmaps.
Jim: Yeah, it definitely sounds like it’s a journey, and getting this rating, I think, just helps assess our path along the way, like as we went through school and got our grades to help assess how we’re doing along the way. So which specific practices or innovations do you believe had the most significant impact on our climate change strategy?
Mike: I would say, you know, first of all declaring externally, publicly, openly, that you have a set of targets and you have viable pathways or programs to work to make those targets. Which again, those are the types of things that you lay out in your CDP reporting. So I think that part’s absolutely important. I think the work we do to engage our organization. And reflecting that in the response to, in the CDP platform is super important. And, you know, none of us can do this individually. We’ve got to work as a team, broad team. And I think those elements are really important.
I think the management and the leadership elements, how we’re organized, how we govern, what’s the governance for our environmental sustainability activities, what are our strategies, what are our metrics, presenting those really key measures that you bring and that heartbeat of doing that every year, bringing that, bringing that forward, and again, having that all built into the organization so they can bring those metrics forward every year. That’s a big part of, I think, what the contribution is from CDP.
You know, I think the rating recognizes a lot of the different best practices and that we’re making great progress. Obviously, an A minus means we didn’t get an A, so, you know, I’m still striving to go farther, and I think that’s a great attitude for companies as we look ahead.
Jim: Yeah, we definitely want that 4.0, so we got to just keep going till we get there with it. But you know, we can celebrate this milestone where we’re at. How will this achievement influence our future sustainability strategies and actions, I guess, to further reduce our environmental impact?
Mike: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jim: Let’s see. I guess turning from what we do internally here at Emerson, what are some ways we’re helping our customers in the manufacturing and production industries drive their sustainability improvement initiatives?
Mike: Yeah, I think that’s a great, great question. Many of our customers – we have thousands and thousands of customers around the world–and of course, they also report to the CDP. They have also established targets. They’re also trying to make their progress.
And I think the great thing about what we do and what we can be helpful with is providing that automation capabilities so that customers can measure so that customers can optimize, so they can maybe reduce their energy and reduce the emissions associated with that energy.
They can think about starting to utilize some of the pillars of activities in energy transition so maybe standing up and trialing some hydrogen projects or having a carbon capture system or, in some cases with some of our customers, making a biofuel from a waste. Those types of activities. So, our portfolio is super important, whether it’s in the measuring sense of that, in the controlling the operation, what’s going on physically, in that sense, the control systems where usually our customers put their logic of what it is that they’re doing or manufacturing and how they manage all of those things in a real-time basis.
And then a lot of software. We have a lot of software that’s related to analysis and simulation and training, recipe management, and just all of the things that you can do to make yourselves better and probably look at the metrics that you would consider to be the environmental metrics and then the ways that you can make improvements in those.
Jim: Yeah, I think you raise a good point. It used to be you put in enough measurements and everything just to get the process to run smoothly for you, but now with what technology has enabled all the diagnostics and everything else to be able to do things like measure the energy efficiency in real-time and optimize around that and other parts, I think that’s really significant. I guess looking forward, what’s next for us at Emerson to really drive our performance in this area even further.
Mike: Jim, I think there’s a couple of things that we’re focused on what’s next in the one to two to three-year timeframe. Things that we’re activating. One thing is and I think this is an issue every company has, is just getting your data to a better place. A lot of effort around capturing more metrics. Having the visibility on those, being able to present those to our employees, our management teams around the world.
There’s a lot of data work going on. And I think that’s a space where lots of companies are involved in those things. We’ve also got regulatory activities where there’s gonna be more reporting required about either some of the materials maybe that we put into the world as a product or some of your activities. Certainly, emissions are a good example of that.
We’ve also introduced a zero waste of landfill target, which requires a significant amount of diversion away from sending something to landfills and having good options for what you do with waste in your facilities. So we’ve embarked on that journey. Again, that’s a data that’s having a program around that’s doing waste treasure hunts, which kind of emulate our energy, treasure hunts, where we go, work with our facilities to make their improvements, see those opportunities.
So I think as we look ahead, we’ve got some more of that data, that whole data management structure to go there. Obviously, I still continue to focus on our organization learning and engaging and being directly active in what we do in our facilities.
And I think also Emerson’s got, I’m gonna call it a duty to take what we know and take it out into our communities. We know how to measure things. We know a lot of engineering and technical things. Those are gifts that we can give to our communities, and having our employees do that outreach and that educational piece as well, I think, is really important.
Jim: So the culture you’re instilling around just being more sustainable in all we do. How are you as you speak to other chief sustainability officers or the leaders in our company’s sustainability efforts, coaching them on how to change their culture?
Mike: First of all, I’d love to learn from others and I’ll steal any good idea I can find and obviously want to share what we’ve learned.
I think the great part about environmental sustainability space is it’s not proprietary. We all want to make the difference. We all have to work collectively, frankly, to get the world to net zero. So I think it’s a great collaborative space to begin with. You know, guidance I give is to get started, to get rolling, work through your employees.
I think that’s, again, we have 70,000 here at Emerson. I work through the 70,000 folks here. We have 15,000 supplier organizations. We’ve spent a lot of time with many of those to kind of paint the picture of how to go about this. Exchange best practices. I learned from them, they learned from us.
So I think those are really important things. And I think what’s interesting is every year or two you think you’ve learned something. We’ve done an energy treasure hunt. We’ve found some great ideas. We’ve implemented them. The next time we go back into an energy treasure hunt, we’ve gotten so much smarter and we see more.
So I think it’s just stay focused and keep making progress. There’s always gonna be more opportunities that are out there to focus on as we look ahead.
Jim: You made such an important point there that this isn’t like technology development and the competition and worried about keeping your intellectual property private.
We’re all on the same mission here, and being able to share freely, whether they’re your competitors, whether it’s suppliers, whether everyone else and I liked what you said there, I have kind of variation on that. Sometimes the best ideas are the ones that you borrow from someone else and then implement, maybe taking a new direction.
I guess as we wind things down here, any closing thoughts that you have for our listeners and maybe from the standpoint of what they might do to carry that torch into their organization if they’re at the front end of this and seeking to instill change in their organization.
Mike: Yeah, I would say, first of all, every company’s capable of getting an A and A-minus in the CDP ratings, right? There’s a great guide there to follow, to build up your processes over time. So certainly take a look at that, that it’s great information. I’d say secondly, on the cultural front again, driving employee engagement, giving them permissions, giving your employees permission to activate to do things, and what always boggles my mind and love is the creativity of our employees and the people that we engage with.
People come up with things that I had never thought of, I didn’t have a point of view on. We celebrate those. We actually have environmental sustainability awards in the company, which we will be announcing during Earth Month in April this year. There’s just the number of ideas and how high quality they were. It’s just amazing. So get going, make progress, embrace it. I think the disclosure aspect of it is a good accountability mechanism that we continue to make progress. Don’t go for perfection; just keep making progress. I think that’s a big point.
Jim: Well, that’s really good guidance. Just keep driving it forward. Just be persistent and consistent about the way you go about it. Well, Mike, I want to thank you so much for joining us here today and sharing your thoughts and continue to move our company forward and get all of us and we’ll get that A. We will strive and we will achieve that A. So thanks for joining us.
Mike: Thanks Jim.
– End of Transcript –
We have all become very comfortable with subscription services for entertainment services and we see it advance into other areas of our lives—even in our world of automation.
I spoke with Emerson’s Juan Carlos Bravo about how the DeltaV PK controller has evolved with the recent DeltaV PK Flex controller introduction. It enables greater flexibility and scalability to subscribe only to the size and functions you require for your project.
Additions and/or subtractions are managed through a subscription to quickly address scope changes in projects and simplify ongoing operations.
Give the podcast a listen, and check out the DeltaV PK Flex Controller section on Emerson.com for more information on how this approach can help drive more successful projects.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. This is Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. When it comes to control for process and hybrid manufacturing, sometimes scalability is an important thing to be able to start small, grow to fit the needs of your process. And that’s something we’re going to talk about today.
I’m joined by Juan Carlos Bravo, and he oversees the DeltaV PK controller and integration for the DeltaV platform. And, we’re going to specifically talk a little bit about the DeltaV PK Flex controller. Welcome Juan Carlos.
Juan Carlos: Thank you, Jim.
Jim: Well, it’s great to have you with us today. So let’s just dive in and get started here. So what’s happening across the globe and in the industry that’s driving manufacturers to execute their projects differently today than maybe how they did in the past?
Juan Carlos: Well, Jim, what I’m seeing in the manufacturing industry is that, well, just like everyone else, they need to deliver more with less resources, right?
What I mean more is they have to execute faster. Most of their projects to meet the customer demands. They have different ways of building plants now, things like modular construction. Also, we’re seeing investments coming back to North America. A lot of new technologies coming into place that requires venture capital. So they have a new product, like new vaccines, hydrogen, energy, recycling, plastics, carbon capture. So all these new industries with new projects that, we don’t know how to execute, and we need to go back to market really fast. And that basically creates a lot of uncertainty because you need to start with an R&D project, then move it into proof of concept.
And then basically move it into production in matter of months sometimes, right? Like what happened in the pandemic with the vaccines, we have to go and validate a vaccine, like literally nine months. So that’s truly what is happening in the industry. And as a result of that is people have to digitalize a lot of their plans, right? They need to put more intelligent devices, more intelligent valves, motor starters to actually feed into your control system. And then your controller or your DCS should be able to process that information so you can actually use it to improve your process. So it’s a lot going on.
Jim: Yeah, that sounds like it’s not just all the new industries and things that we’re seeing now is even in existing. Everyone’s wrestling with the lot of retirements going on, fewer people to do more, challenge changes in the different industries. So, yeah, you really nailed a lot of those challenges there. So what are, as speaking of challenges, what are some of the challenges customers are seeing as they try to drive this digitalization?
Juan Carlos: Well, one of the biggest challenges that I look at it is the capacity, as you say, when we look at a project that starts as a R&D project, while you’re just using a couple signals. And then as you move along into proof of concept and production, you need to keep adding a lot of capacity into your process and your controllers.
And as I say, it’s very uncertain because you don’t know you are experimenting, you are trying out new things. You’re changing in your engineering. You want to go to production really fast. So having a flexible platform, that’s probably one of the biggest challenges customers face. And then maybe the other big challenge is how do you pay for this? A lot of these new projects requires capital investment, pretty large capital investment. So how do we provide a way of paying for these projects as they execute?
Jim: Yeah. That’s always, whether personally or as businesses, the paying for it thing is one of those challenges. So Juan Carlos, how is Emerson helping to address these particular challenges?
Juan Carlos: Well, we are introducing DeltaV PK Flex controller that is this has the same powerful functionality as our PK controller, but with the added advantage that it has flexible capacity and also a subscription base. So by flexible capacity, I mean, the PKs have a fixed model number that is the capacity. For example, PK 100 is 100 DSTs (device signal tags), PK 300 is 300 DSTs, and so on and so on.
PK Flex has no starting capacity. It can go from 50 to 1500, and the only thing you need to do is to subscribe to whatever capacity you want.
Jim: I can see why you put flex in the name there. That does sound very flexible. We know a lot about the advantages and benefits of the DeltaV PK controller, but for those who perhaps are new to what we offer, can you tell me a little bit more?
Juan Carlos: Yes, for sure. So definitely PK controller is our most powerful controller. And PK Flex is based on the same powerful functionality. If you remember, PK Flex controller is really easy to do redundancy. You just have one base plate and you add a new controller right next to it, just like other controllers in DeltaV.
But it can talk to any of our IO in the system. It can talk to traditional IO, to CHARMS, to wireless IO. But also I think so, what it makes it more powerful it has native Ethernet protocols like OPC server, MODBUS server, Ethernet IP or MODBUS TCP scanner, and recently released PROFINET again. And it’s one of our most powerful controllers because has the biggest CPU and memory, right? So PK Flex and PK controller has the exact same functionality. The big difference is PK Flex, as I mentioned, is just going to be flexible capacity and is licensable in subscription.
Jim: So I can see with that flexibility that might be helpful in your projects that you’re executing. So how does the PK Flex controller deliver Project Certainty and solve those challenges around limited resources?
Juan Carlos: Well, Project Certainty, as its name says, we want to remove any uncertainty when you’re executing that project. And when you’re doing a large project and you don’t know the capacity, because maybe, you need 100 or 300 DSTs, and I’m sorry I didn’t mention, but DSTs is device signal tags. And it’s the way we count IO in DeltaV. And basically those, you don’t know how many IO you’re going to be bringing in a project. By providing a controller that can go from 50 to 1500, it removes that uncertainty and gives total flexibility to the people doing the engineering. So when they’re doing a project, they know they just order a controller knowing you will have the capacity they need, regardless of how they come up with a design, right?
The DSTs is another factor of uncertainty because in the past, we used to require to say, hey, you need analog input DSTs, analog output DSTs, discrete input DSTs, or discrete output DSTs. But when you were doing that design, well, you know what? I’m going to change a DO for an AO. And also you need to change an order, order a new license. With PK Flex, we introduce new Flex DSTs. And what does it means is that now we don’t care all the types. You just give us a number of inputs or outputs you need. And that’s going to be the capacity of your controller. And those are the Flex DSTs you subscribe. Again, removing complications around engineering. Just don’t figure out the types. Just tell me how you need and that’s going to help.
Jim: Yeah, those changes are the killers of project schedule and budget and all the other things around there. So that sounds pretty powerful. Now, you’ve mentioned subscription-based licensing a few times. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that works?
Juan Carlos: Yes. Well, with subscription-based licenses, the first advantage is you only subscribe to what you need.
That’s number one. Like I mentioned, you know you have a PK Flex and you just subscribe to how many DSTs you want, which Ethernet protocols you need, or even you need redundancy. Right, right there, it helps you optimize the cost. Because in the past, when you’re buying a PK controller, everything was attached to the hardware, and the hardware had all the functionality open. You use it or not. With subscription, the benefit is you only pick what you need, and that’s the subscription you’ve got. You get and then the other benefit, as I mentioned, is by the detaching the hardware from the software. Now the pricing of the hardware is a lot less because it has no functionality, but it has the added benefit that now, if you want to, you can refresh that hardware more often.
For example, there’s customers who wants to have the latest and greatest hardware controller that we come up with, right? Every five years, every seven years, they want to change their controller. When all the price was in the hardware, that was probably cost prohibitive to change all the controllers in your plant. But now, since the cost is in your subscription, now you can move your subscription from hardware platform to hardware platform as we come up with them. So, for example, in the future, if we come up with software defined controller, as we announced at Emerson Exchange this last October, you’re going to be able to go from a PK Flex to a software defined controller with the same subscription, and you just change your hardware platform, right?
So it gives you mobility and helps you to refresh your hardware. And be able to optimize your process. And obviously, as I mentioned, the subscription allows you to lower your capital investment. As I mentioned in the past, if you needed to modernize a whole plant, sometimes you have to argue for a million of dollars. But now, with subscription, you can start with 50 DSTs if you want to just buy one PK Flex in your DeltaV system. And you can start modernizing pieces of your plant as you go. And you just pay as you go in your subscription. So I think that’s what is the game changer on subscription.
Jim: Well, that’s another dimension of flexibility in there to be able to do that. Now, I can almost read the minds of some of our listeners that are hearing this now with this fear saying, “Oh, I didn’t pay my subscription. Are you going to shut down the plant, when that subscription expires?” Is that a real concern or not?
Juan Carlos: Yeah, I have been asked that question many times, and that’s probably what is number one concern, especially operators, because the people in operations tell me, you know what? I’m not in charge of paying the subscription that normally my accounting or my finance group and they’re always late, right? The way we design PK Flex and the subscription is no, is that PK Flex has a expiration in the license.
You’re going to be warning the system and obviously we’re going to send you a lot of emails, but if it expires, it will not shut down the process. It will continue operating. You will continue to run your PID loops or whatever you’re doing. The only functionality we’re taking away is the total download and partial download, right? So you’re not gonna be able to add new functionality. Into your process, but you’re going to be able to continue to operate.
Jim: And you’ll warn our listeners far enough in advance so they can light a fire under their folks in finance?
Juan Carlos: That’s for sure. Yeah, they’re going to be bombarded by emails and also is going to be reported in Guardian. So Guardian will be able to tell you when your subscription expires. And I believe so, it’s not right now, but in the future it’s going to be able to automatically renew through Guardian if you want to.
Jim: Okay, well that should set aside that fear. So Juan Carlos, I want to thank you so much for joining us. And I know if our listeners want to learn more about this, you can go to Emerson.com/DeltaVPKFlex. And I’ll have a hyperlink in the transcript for that. So thank you so much for joining us.
Juan Carlos: Thank you, Jim.
– End of Transcript –
Pipelines move the energy required to make our modern world possible. Moving liquids from crude oil to sustainable aviation fuels is energy-intensive. Optimizing the flow of these liquids is critical for less carbon-intensive pipeline operations.
Emerson’s Jennifer Worthen joined me in this podcast to discuss ways to drive more optimized performance. Give the podcast a listen and visit the SCADA Solutions & Software for Energy Logistics section on Emerson.com for more solutions to drive more sustainable pipeline performance.
TranscriptJim: Hi everybody, I’m Jim Cahill and this is another Emerson Automation Experts Podcast. Pipelines are critical infrastructure across the globe, bringing needed energy for our civilization to continue to advance. Today, Jennifer Worthen joins me to discuss ways to optimize pipelines carrying liquids to their destination for processing and use.
Welcome, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Hi, Jim. Thanks for having me.
Jim: Well, we’re glad that you’re here to share your knowledge with us. Well, let’s begin by having you share with our listeners, your background and path to your current role here at Emerson.
Jennifer: Absolutely. My background is I have a PhD in computational science, engineering and mathematics.
So that was really fun to do. It involves doing the mathematics and the development/coding, and then the science as well. And so this is, has been really beneficial in working at Emerson. I have been working on Emerson software for the past 10 years, working on mostly optimization as a subject matter expert, and I’ve applied it to different pieces of software in the company over my time.
Jim: Wow, those are some fabulous credentials there. I imagine college years and all that must have been a whole lot of fun.
Jennifer: Absolutely. Yes.
Jim: Okay. Well, at Emerson, we speak a lot about optimization. So let’s start out by putting it into the right context.
We’ll be discussing optimization of liquid pipelines that transport energy products. So what does optimization mean in relation to pipelines? Are there multiple ways to optimize pipeline operations?
Jennifer: Yes, there absolutely are. If you, I always say, if you ask 10 different people what pipeline optimization means, you might get 10 different answers.
There are so many different things that you can try to optimize. One thing that you can do is try to optimize the volumes of the batches that are going down the line. So you have, X barrels of product one followed by X barrels of product two. And you can try to do some optimization on how large or how small those batch sizes are.
You could also optimize ordering of batches that can affect your costs and your operations quite greatly actually. And the type of optimization that I focus the most on is deciding of, so you’ve got these pumps that are moving the liquids from point A to point B. These pumps are run either on electricity or by fuel.
And so my optimization software goes through and decides how many of these pumps need to be running. How can we run them the most efficiently to make the movement cost as low as possible? We also have an expensive chemical called drag-reducing agent or DRA. And this improves the throughput of a pipeline, but it is very expensive.
So, there’s a trade-off between using more electricity from your pumps or using more DRA in the line to reduce the drag as it’s moving down the line. So the optimization can take that into account and look for a sweet spot between the two in order to minimize the operational costs of moving down the pipeline.
Jim: That’s interesting that, so you have different constraints there that you’re trying to optimize around. So how does optimizing to minimize operational costs differ from optimizing to minimize station emissions?
Jennifer: That is an excellent question. Minimizing operational costs is going to depend on your power contracts at each of the stations and how much DRA you’re using in your pipeline, but minimizing station emissions is a little bit different because it depends on how the electricity for each of the stations is generated.
Some stations may be generated in different ways and it could be a different factor than the actual power contract cost is. And so you may end up weighing different stations differently in terms of their usage, depending on their generation type for that station.
Jim: I guess is we look at it from our customers’ perspectives. What are some of their primary concerns regarding optimizing pipeline operations?
Jennifer: So, one of the biggest concerns is, of course, the spending moving the products from point A to point B, both the spending on the electric or fuel to run the pumps and the DRA, but other things that are concerns as well are the station emissions.
And then just the general efficiency of the pipeline, the asset utilization, the wear and tear of all the assets, you have to be careful that you’re not overusing any of your assets unnecessarily, and then causing them extra wear and tear that’s not necessary.
Jim: Yeah, that sounds like a number of trade-offs there to balance, especially with the push for everybody around more sustainable operations. So how does pipeline optimization benefit our customers that are operating liquid pipelines?
Jennifer: Pipeline optimization can provide a lot of different benefits to these types of customers. In addition to the cost savings that you can achieve, which is obviously quite valuable, there is a lot of really good, different pieces of data that you can get from pipeline optimization software. For example, knowing ahead of time what your power costs are going to be for the next month, six months, a year.
Having an estimate of that value is also something that’s very valuable. This type of software is very good at answering questions that can help you make business decisions. For example, if I need to move extra volume over the next month, how much is that actually going to cost me? Those types of questions are very easy to answer using software like this and provide actual data for making those business decisions rather than just using guesses.
Jim: It’s a unique industry in that way that optimization, there’s so many economic factors that go into just based on the geographic spread of these pipelines and different rates for electricity and everything else. So it sounds like a complex problem that software can help address.
You know, we’ve, we’ve covered some of these broad challenges and some of the things people are optimizing around but getting more specific. What are some software solutions that Emerson offers to support optimization and emission reduction goals for pipeline transportation companies? And do these solutions integrate with other pipeline modeling and simulation solutions?
Jennifer: Emerson has a piece of software called PipelineOptimizer. That is the main software that I work on. And it goes through and does all of these optimization goals that we’ve been talking about so far. So minimizing your operational costs by choosing how your pump should operate and how much DRA you should use.
It can also do optimization on what flow rates you should be running at to minimize operational cost overall. So, that software is very flexible in terms of what it can model and has a lot of different modes, depending on what it is that you’re trying to optimize. Because like we talked about earlier, optimization can mean different things to different people.
So, we have a few different modes, depending on what goals you are trying to achieve. Now, in terms of integration, we do integrate with other pipeline modeling software. Our biggest integration point is with our software that is called PipelineScheduler. In that software, it’s used to come up with the batch plan, the ordering of all the products and their volumes that you want to move over, say, the next month.
And then that can be directly imported into the PipelineOptimizer software so that you can optimize the operations, optimize your flow rates, do all the hard math that figures out how to run things best and then send that back over to the scheduling software so you can get a full picture of what’s going to happen on your pipeline over the next month.
Jim: So PipelineOptimizer and PipelineScheduler. So how did these software tools relate to automating pipeline optimization results?
Jennifer: Automation is a really fun question to think about in terms of optimization. We have a lot of goals for integrating with more software that Emerson has, especially it’s batch tracking software and its leak detection software.
So that while you are running your pipeline as an operator, you would be able to see if you are running optimally or not at the current state of time and decide, oh, maybe I should switch to using these pumps instead, or maybe I should be running at a lower flow rate. Those types of decisions to be able to be made a little bit more in an automated fashion, showing the operator what should be done instead, then leads us to, okay, then can we actually automate these results and run the system with a person watching, making sure everything looks good.
Can we do better in terms of automating this so that we don’t have to think about, oh, maybe I should do this? Maybe I should do that. If we’re doing it in an automated fashion, then things run smoother just by default.
Jim: Yeah, that makes sense. You’ve got the system watching over based on your objectives of what you’re trying to do to do what’s necessary in automated again with the supervision over all of that. It would be interesting to hear some successes that we’ve seen. Can you provide some real-world results, maybe without naming names and all that pipeline operators have experienced?
Jennifer: Absolutely. We’ve got quite a few customers that are extremely happy with the results and data that PipelineOptimizer is providing for them.
We have a few customers that are using PipelineOptimizer to, once they’ve reduced their costs and optimize how much DRA they’re using, they’re able to go back and calculate how much emissions have been reduced by performing these optimization results, which can be quite significant. And then another major US-based pipeline operator is able to use Pipeline Optimizer when optimizing the different flow rates over the system. They can reduce their cost by 10 to 15%. And this cost is the electricity that’s used by the stations and the cost of the DRA as well. So that can be pretty significant in terms of what you’re able to do using PipelineOptimizer.
Jim: 10 to 15 percent that is pretty significant. I’d like my home electricity bill to be lowered 10 to 15%. I guess I had mentioned sustainability a little earlier. So how is our software helping customers calculate and minimize the carbon footprint of their liquids pipelines.
Jennifer: That is an excellent question. Our PipelineOptimizer software does go through and calculate an estimation for what the carbon footprint is of the pipeline for the simulated time period.
So you could run a 30-day simulation and get an estimate for the emissions for that time period. And then one thing that I’ve been working on over the last couple of days actually is doing an actual emissions optimization. So when you do mathematical optimization, you have what’s called an objective function, which is what you’re trying to minimize.
And in most cases, what you’re trying to minimize is the overall operational cost. But for this emissions optimization, instead of doing costs, I’m trying to minimize the emissions generated by the system. Like we discussed, it’s a little bit different. It’s going to give you a slightly different answer, but it’s also something very interesting to study and see what the differences actually look like and how it does change your cost.
And so I’ve been working on that recently that will be coming out in the software relatively soon. And we’re really excited to be able to share that with our customers.
Jim: That is interesting. So does that mean Pipeline Optimizer can be used to calculate the emissions of a pipeline that it would generate if it was not optimized?
Jennifer: Absolutely, that is absolutely the case because you can run both scenarios in the software. You can run a non-optimized scenario and then the optimized scenario and see what the differences between the emissions on the two.
Jim: Oh, that’s great. Well, what role do you see the pipeline industry playing in the transition to a low-carbon economy? And how will our software help facilitate the management of a wider mix of energy products, I guess, to help our customers achieve their net zero goals?
Jennifer: Emerson is taking an approach to the transition to a low-carbon economy by ensuring that our simulation software is able to handle and fully model this wider mix of energy products that we will be seeing in the near future.
We’re already getting asked by different customers, “can you model X? Can you model Y?” And so we are making sure that we can cover all of these different types of compositions of fluids that will be moved in the pipelines. And in terms of attaining net zero goals, I think that the emissions optimization and emissions modeling and Pipeline Optimizer will be a very big benefit to that. Because you can see how much emissions you’re currently using, and then go through and try to reduce that using the emissions optimization mode that I’ve been working on.
It will be different than minimizing costs, but it is an important goal to reflect on and make sure that we are moving towards.
Jim: Well, I know I’m smarter about pipeline optimization than I was before we started our conversation here. So let’s wind things down. Do you have any final perspectives to share with our listeners about pipeline optimization?
Jennifer: Yeah, we’re continuing to closely monitor the energy evolution and the impact it’s having on the industry. We are learning every single day from our customers and how they are preparing to manage this broader mix of products within their existing operations. This information allows us to track changing needs and align our solutions so that we can appropriately handle what it is our customers need.
But based on what we’ve learned so far, we are confident that our current software offerings will be able to handle these newer energy products and provide the foundation that they need. This will absolutely help our customers fully leverage their software investments with Emerson.
Jim: Yeah, that’s an important point. We’re in a very dynamic situation where more hydrogen is going to be coming along and everything else. So I’m glad that you and the team are on top of this change and ready to adapt to whatever our customers need. And I guess just to finish things, where can our listeners go to learn more?
Jennifer: I recommend visiting Emerson.com/EnergyLogistics, where you can see our entire suite of advanced pipeline software, which does include PipelineOptimizer.
Jim: Well, that’s great. Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your expertise on pipeline optimization with our listeners today.
Jennifer: Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate it.
– End of transcript –
There is no shortage of data in most manufacturing and production operations. The problem is that it is often scattered and not available to make the most informed decisions to run the process optimally.
I spoke with Emerson’s Zachary Sample about how the DeltaV™ Edge Environment enables greater use of operational data scattered across various systems and software applications to help you improve overall performance in safety, efficiency, reliability, and sustainability.
Give the podcast a listen, and check out the DeltaV Edge Environment section on Emerson.com for more information on how this approach can help advance your digital transformation initiatives.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. This is Jim Cahill with another edition of the Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Digital transformation or digitalization is a strategic focus for most manufacturers in order to improve overall performance in safety, efficiency, reliability, and/or sustainability. Today, Zach Sample joins me to discuss ways to drive these digitalization efforts. Welcome, Zachary.
Zachary: Hey, Jim. Great to be here.
Jim: Well, it’s great having you here. Well, let’s get into it a little bit. So what global economic and industry trends are driving manufacturers to change the way they are operating?
Zachary: Yeah, one of the biggest things that we see is that the manufacturers are being pressured to be really doing more with less and that’s, they’re needing to increase safety, sustainability, and profitability while also dealing with diminishing workforce and skilled resources that are out there.
Fortunately, what we’re seeing is there are some emerging technologies that are helping to address those things and many manufacturers are using that as a cue and realizing that if they don’t make use of these technologies and take their first steps on their digitalization journey, if they haven’t already, that they’re going to be left behind.
Jim: That is a common thing you hear about. With all these retirements going on, all these baby boomers retiring, you just don’t have the same amount of people to solve things and thankfully, advances in technology are helping to cope with that a little bit. So what are some of the challenges manufacturers and producers are having when they have to drive digitalization?
Zachary: There are really two big ones that jump out to me. And the first one is the organizational readiness for digitalization. And that’s the organization is mature enough. It’s prepared for it. And in order to take that first step on that journey and that there’s organizational alignment in order to make that happen.
And that’s all about making sure there’s buy-in from the right stakeholders to making sure all of your workflows are accounted for because that’s where a lot of these initiatives can wind up. falling on their face. But, the other aspect is with this large explosion of OT data with technologies like APL, the biggest questions that we have is great, we have all this data, but how do I, how do I make it accessible? How do I make it usable?
And that ranges from how do I make it accessible safely and securely. Across my enterprise in a way that I can get access to the right people. There’s the part that is making sure that we are able to make that data usable because a lot of the data that is out there is not in a very easily consumable format and what we see is, hey, we’re wanting to spend less time figuring out how to get to manipulate the data, more time using the data where there is more value created, minimizing the amount of time spent doing that. And that’s because it can be a huge barrier to entry with the amount of effort that goes into collecting this data, manipulating that data, and making it usable.
Jim: That certainly sounds like a number of challenges to try to overcome. I heard cyber security concerns in there, just the fact that maybe today it’s scattered around different silos, that kind of thing, and then really being able to get it to the right people to be able to do something with it. So that’s a number of things that people have to overcome. So you mentioned usability and accessibility of data. So how is Emerson helping to address these particular challenges?
Zachary: So there’s a couple things that Emerson is doing, and the first thing is around data management specifically.
I mentioned that that was one of the big challenges, is being able to get access to and make that data usable, is in partnership with AspenTech, is the use of AspenTech Inmation, in order to be able to both handle non-timestamped or variety of different data types to be able to scale this data across our enterprise and be able to create a more simplified connectivity from our producers of that data up to our consumers of that data.
So that’s a big aspect that we’re doing with AspenTech Inmation. But the other aspect is just how are we publishing and streaming this data out from all of these different resources? DeltaV is already a big collector of data. But the DeltaV Edge environment is allowing us to provide secure read only access to this data.
It streams all of this data up into our enterprise network so that it can be used by different consumers. So whether that’s historical data, runtime data, alarming events data, configuration data, all of that information is published there and in context, so it reduces the amount of time our users have to spend getting that data and making it accessible.
Jim: That sounds like you’re letting the data out to get to where it’s needed, but with the security to make sure people aren’t getting into that. Can you tell me a little bit more about what the DeltaV Edge environment is and what it entails?
Zachary: Absolutely. So the DeltaV Edge environment, I like to think of as being made up of three main components. There’s our data provider component. That is what publishes our DeltaV data, all of these different DeltaV data types up into our edge node. There’s the edge node component, which is our data repository.
It’s where we store a one year data cache of all of our data for the system. And then there is our data egress options where we can use either REST API, which is a common way to query data or OPC UA, which is a common connector for most industrial software applications.
Jim: Okay, so how does the DeltaV Edge environment meet the cybersecurity standards that we have?
Zachary: Yeah, and that’s a really big one, and you called that out as one of the big things that I mentioned in the challenges is how do we make sure that whatever we’re delivering, continues to meet the cybersecurity standards that are out there.
What the DeltaV Edge environment offers is out of the box, it provides read only connection to this data. So it is encrypted point-to-point, meaning that it is secure. In practice, that means that you could publish that data from your controls network layer up to L3 or L4 on the network. We also offer a data diode for our users that are trying to meet the IEC 62443 standard for cybersecurity.
So we’re not skipping levels in our Purdue model. And we offer a data diode in order to be able to continue to meet those cybersecurity requirements as well.
Jim: Well, that sounds like a pretty secure data to get it out from the control system up and to where it may be needed. So how is this managed across the enterprise?
Zachary: So one of the biggest things is that the DeltaV Edge environment allows us to now get this data out from what is traditionally our controls network layer, our operational data layer, and stream this data up into our enterprise network. So we’re talking our L3 network or L4 network from a Purdue model perspective, which means we’re now able to get the right data to the right people across our organizations.
But then taking a step forward for our IT folks, they’re now worried about, okay, I have multiple of these installed at different sites around the world is we have something called edge orchestration. And that is through our partnership with Zadata. We’re able to manage, update, deploy applications in our DeltaV Edge environment from a single user interface. So that way, it’s very scalable for our users.
Jim: Well, that sounds really helpful from a maintenance perspective. So, from our DeltaV engineers’ perspective, what does it all mean for them having this edge device added to their network?
Zachary: Yeah, and that is one of the biggest things for our DeltaV engineers is, of course, is that security that whoever’s accessing this data couldn’t accidentally do something to the actual production environment.
And so in order to address that, what’s great about this, I say this a little bit tongue in cheek is the, it’s keeping our DeltaV tourists out of the system. Right? We are read only. We can look at the data, but we’re just looking at the data. And so they get that security of being confident that there aren’t hands in the system that could be interfering.
But then also it is designed to be set and forget. Our automation teams that are DeltaV users have plenty of things to work on and focus on. Data management doesn’t need to be one of them. Nobody wants their full time job as a DeltaV engineer to be getting data out of DeltaV. And so this makes it so this is a set and forget where you can easily get access to it without having to continuously maintain these connections and the data community systems.
Jim: So what is that expression? Fences make good neighbors or something like that. It’s almost like this edge device makes good neighbors of the OT community and the IT community. So that sounds like a pretty big benefit for both sides there.
Zachary: That’s a good analogy.
Jim: You mentioned how this helps solve digitalization initiatives. So what kind of practical applications does this support?
Zachary: As we talked about, it does help overcome the barriers to some of these digitalization and initiatives because it allows us to take less time with the accessing of the data and less focus on the security of how we’re going to get to that data.
But that’s the bigger digitalization initiative. And so in practice, the DeltaV Edge environment on its own, because it has all of these different datas coming out of DeltaV and it has these different data egress options with REST APIs and OPC UA. We now have more capabilities of from a practical application standpoint.
So we have users that are using the REST API function to query the data, whether that’s alarm data, control performance data, diagnostic data, in order to pull that into a reporting tool. A common one would be something like Power BI. And then other users of industrial software applications, whether we’re doing and AI is currently the popular topic or whether we’re doing analytics or machine learning or what have you, we can install these industrial applications on top of our edge environment and make use of all the data that is there.
And so those are two of the most powerful ways that we’re seeing these used in practical specific use cases, in addition to the larger digitalization. We are collecting a lot of resources on our website, www.Emerson.com/DeltaVEdge. What we’re collecting there right now is a lot of some of the product capabilities. But we expect to also start posting more of these applications and use cases as we collect them from our users and manufacturers as well.
Jim: Well, that’s great. In fact, you saved me from asking a question, where can our listeners go to learn more? And you said it Emerson.com/DeltaVEdge. And we’ll make sure to put a link on that in the transcript of our podcast here. So, Zach, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing ways to help our listeners drive their digitalization initiatives in their organizations.
Zachary: Yep. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
– End of transcript –
Modern digital technologies are vital in driving manufacturing and production performance improvements. Getting the most out of these technologies requires the knowledge and skills specific to their use. Educational courses help in upskilling personnel. The quality of that education helps determine how successfully the learned skills will be applied.Emerson's Sandra Schwarz joins me in this podcast to discuss how quality and compliance with standards are embedded across the broad range of education services and training from Emerson.Give the podcast a listen and visit the Education Services & Training section on Emerson.com for ways to increase your employees' knowledge and skills with a full range of training options.TranscriptJim: Hi all, thanks for joining us today. In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, we'll look into some of the reasons that customers come to Emerson because of the quality and reliability of our products, solutions, and services. Emerson products conform to many industry codes and standards such as ASME, ASTM, and ISO 9001, and educational services are no different.Today, I'm catching up with Sandra Schwartz, Senior Manager of Education Services. Sandra will share with us more about quality standards for Emerson's Education Services. Welcome, Sandra.Sandra: Hey, thank you for having me, Jim.Jim: Well, it's great that you're here with us. So, Sandra, how would you describe quality from an education perspective and what does it involve?Sandra: Great question. For Emerson, Quality in education is giving our customers the best learning experience possible. So, this means experience about how they learn and enrolling in our courses. It's everything like coming to our facilities and then also having like professional and qualified instructors. And, most importantly, that the content is relevant and engaging.So, to do all of this, we have to have quality standards that include policies and processes that have to be followed by everyone that touches Education for our customers.Jim: Well, that certainly seems like it incorporates that lifecycle from, you know, signing up for it to the instructors and teaching it, and that the content is very relevant to what they're trying to get out of it. So what would you say our customers' primary concerns are regarding quality standards?Sandra: Well, our customers' primary concerns are that they want to be able to fully utilize the functionality and the capability of Emerson products that they've purchased. So, many times, a customer will ask about our processes before ever coming to a learning event.Once we share that we are IACET accredited and that we offer CEUs with many of our courses, then, you know, customers feel more confident that the people that they send to our training events will have a great experience and they know that we at Emerson are dedicated to their success.Jim: That's interesting. So how is Emerson ensuring and addressing high-quality standards for courses?Sandra: Well, you know, great question again. And we do this through our accreditation with IACET. And that stands for International Accreditation of Continuing Education and Training. This is an accreditation that Emerson has maintained since 2008.And this accreditation standard holds Emerson to a higher quality to design, develop, and deliver our training. It also ensures that we have different systems and solutions in place, you know, for us to enroll students to track their progress. To evaluate, are they learning what we intended for them to learn?And we have the ability to report on all of this and look at that data so that we're constantly improving for future customer events. So we have to be audited every year and through those standards and policies, that's how we are able to ensure that high quality for our customers.Jim: Yeah. It sounds like that collection of data and being able to apply that in a continuous improve...
Conozca en voz de nuestros especialistas, las tendencias en automatización para la industria de litio. Abordaremos principalmente las innovaciones en cuanto a medición y monitoreo de variables del proceso críticas.Te invitamos a ver el episodio completo y suscríbirte a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.¡Disfruta del videocast!
In this podcast, Caressa Kendall joins podcast host Jim Cahill to highlight the advantages and capabilities within the MyTraining section of MyEmerson to help manufacturers and producers upskill their workforce for improved operational performance.
Emerson Education Services offer innovative, scalable, and customizable training solutions that enable you to strategically use workforce development to sustain growth in highly competitive industries. And to better understand how, Adelina Decean, Education Services Manager for Emerson joins us.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Molly Firkins, DeltaV Product Marketing Manager for Batch Solutions, joins me to discuss these trends and ways technology is supporting these manufacturers as they address increasing capital projects that use modular manufacturing equipment, switching to single-use equipment in smaller, more customized production, and pushing toward continuous manufacturing where possible.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Jim Cahill speaks with Emerson’s Aaron Crews who leads the modernization team. Aaron discusses a new application, REVAMP which is a groundbreaking, cloud-based, advanced software solution that helps manage the transition of legacy applications to optimal control.
Conoce Aspentech, un aliado en la digitalización de tus operaciones. En 2022, Emerson anunció la adquisición de la mayor parte de las acciones de esta compañía, con miras a ofrecer a sus clientes un valor agregado a través de las tecnologías de inteligencia avanzada de Aspentech que complementan el portafolio de digitalización de Emerson. En este episodio el experto en soluciones de sostenibilidad Gerardo Muñoz nos detalla los beneficios que aportan las soluciones digitales de esta adquisición, en los objetivos de sostenibilidad de las empresas. Te invitamos a ver el episodio completo y suscribirte a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
En este episodio la especialista Esther Solano nos presenta Pipeline Manager de Emerson. Una solución que permite monitorear, tener control y dar seguimiento a los ductos de gas natural e hidrocarburos líquidos.
Conversamos sobre la importancia de los modelos de simulación en tiempo real. Abordamos la tecnología Pipeline Manager, en cuáles aplicaciones se puede utilizar; ventajas que aporta esta solución a la industria; las consideraciones o requerimientos para optar por esta solución, así como los beneficios de contar con mediciones precisas y confiables.
Te invitamos a escuchar el episodio completo y suscribirte a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
¿Qué pasaría si tuvieras acceso a soporte experto las 24 horas del día, los 7 días de la semana para ayudarte a responder preguntas a medida que surgen problemas o dudas propias o del equipo?
Nuestro especialista en Servicios al Ciclo de Vida de Sistemas de Control Carlos Acosta, nos presenta Guardian, un sistema que permite abordar las necesidades integrales del ciclo de vida para la administración de suscripciones, la conexión con el soporte de productos y la combinación de software y servicios de ciclo de vida.
Suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
The 2050 Net Zero carbon target challenges all of us across the globe. Manufacturing and Production companies that are part of the hydrocarbon value chain are particularly challenged in driving their operations toward Net Zero.
LyondellBasell Chief Procurement Officer Jennifer Jewson and Artemis Energy Partners CEO Bobby Tudor join Emerson’s Denka Wangdi and me in this special podcast to discuss the importance of collaboration and engagement in tackling the Net Zero challenge.
Learn more about some of the initiatives underway by visiting the LyondellBasell Sustainability section on their website, the Carbon Neutral Coalition and Houston Energy Transition Initiative websites, and the Sustainability section on Emerson.com.
TranscriptJim: Hi, everyone. I’m Jim Cahill and welcome to another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. In today’s special podcast, I’m joined by Jennifer Jewson, LyondellBasell’s chief procurement officer, Bobby Tudor, retired founder and CEO of Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co., and currently the CEO of Artemis Energy Partners, and Denka Wangdi, Emerson’s director of sales for sustainability and growth. We’ll be discussing some of the sustainability-related initiatives they are advancing. Welcome, Jennifer, Bobby, and Denka.
Denka: Thanks, Jim.
Jennifer: Thank you.
Bobby: Thanks so much.
Jim: Well, it’s great that you’re all here. We’re excited to have you share your perspectives. I guess, Bobby, let me begin with you. You have a vast background, including beyond what I said in our introduction being currently Chairman of the Houston Energy Transition Initiative, a consortium of Houston’s leading energy companies working to shape the region’s energy transition strategy. Also, you are the board member for the Carbon Neutral Coalition and several other organizations, and other various positions. That must keep you pretty busy, all that going on.
But let’s start by asking you about the Carbon Neutral Coalition and its goals.
Bobby: Jim, the Carbon Neutral Coalition is a coalition, very broad-based coalition of stakeholders in Texas. It’s a Texas-centric proposition. It was put together by Corby Robertson of the Quintana Corporation. And the aim of the Carbon Neutral Coalition is to organize and sort of unite a very broad base of stakeholders in the incumbent oil and gas industry in Texas who are focused on driving the movement of the industry towards true carbon neutrality. And that would include upstream producers, midstream gatherers, downstream users, mineral rights owners, ranchers, landowners broadly, environmentalists, etc. So, a very broad-based group of stakeholders.
And the desire at the end of the day is to have a oil and gas business in Texas that is, in fact, carbon neutral. And so, all of the things that might help get us there are the focus of the Carbon Neutral Coalition’s. That would include carbon capture, use, and storage, CCUS, it would include regulations around methane detector measurement and capture, it would include the elimination of routine flaring, etc. So, it’s really focused specifically on what I call the incumbent oil and gas business in Texas and a drive to make it carbon-neutral over time.
Jim: Well, that certainly sounds like a large challenge for a hydrocarbon or carbon-based business to become carbon neutral in all of that. But I know we’ve got a lot of people here in the state energized to take on that challenge. Jennifer, you have an amazing background with a PhD in inorganic chemistry and an MBA and a lot of experience in your background from perusing LinkedIn, research, chemistry, consulting, feedstock, unit acquisitions, and overall procurement for materials and services.
I guess with that broad experience, can you share how LyondellBasell is advancing its sustainability initiatives to drive towards net zero?
Jennifer: Sure. So, we actually just announced an updated version of our initiatives. And so, we had originally said we were going to reduce our Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas footprint by 30% by 2030. Well, we just raised that to 42%. And we are joining the Science-Based Target initiatives as well so that they can help look at the programs that we have at the sites to make sure that they’re vetted and they’re using the latest technologies.
So, we look at the sites, so that’s Scope 1 and Scope 2. We’ve also announced a Scope 3 target, which is a reduction of 30% by 2030 as well. And so, with all the sites, we have, our carbon reduction programs in place, and we are looking at things like alternative fuels, renewable energy, electrification, so all of those things as we create these roadmaps by the sites.
We signed six actually virtual power purchase agreements in the U.S. this past year and two in Europe. And so, we have a target there where we’d like to have at least 50% of our electricity through renewable by 2030, and then at least 75% of our energy, which should be low carbon. So, we’re working on that as well, and so, for electricity.
So, with all the power purchase agreements we did, we actually combined, it actually could power, I think it’s 370,000 homes. So, it’s exciting for us. So, we drive towards 2030, and then we do have a goal of net zero by 2050. And so, it is very important that we keep on these roadmaps and keep driving the sites.
Jim: Well, congratulations on driving an even higher target for 2030 and all the great things you’re doing so far to move yourself down that path towards net zero.
Denka, let me ask you to share ways Emerson is helping our customers, like LyondellBasell, to achieve their sustainability targets.
Denka: Yeah. Sure. Thanks, Jim. And I just wanted to preface by thanking Jennifer and Bobby for joining us today. So the platform for Emerson essentially is…it’s almost in three manners. It’s “greening of,” essentially how do we keep our own house in order. And it means improving our carbon footprint across 187 facilities. Our “greening by,” which is essentially the technologies that we serve companies like Lyondell with our solutions, our technology that really help them along their sustainability journey.
And then the “greening with,” which is almost the most powerful. It’s, like, the understanding of the ecosystem whether it’s working with universities or the Carbon Neutral Coalition, or really partnering and making sure that we are embedded into that ecosystem. So, the greening of essentially is a smaller mix. It means that we can check off our Scope 1, 2, and 3 net zero targets, which is for the year of 2045, and our Scope 1 and 2, which is for 2030.
Now, we’re far along the ways to making sure our Scope 1 and 2 is met, but when it comes to vendor selection or supply selection, Lyondell and all of our other customers are looking at the people that they wanna partner with to making sure that we’re meeting our targets. So, that’s essentially point one. But really the secret sauce or, if you will, our strength is around the greening by. And if you think about the chemical industry alone, Jim 60% of CO2 comes from just the combustion process.
And Jennifer touched on Scope 3, which is in the chemical industry, about 75% of the total emissions, 75%. I mean, that’s insane. So, the way that we help, whether it’s optimizing the steam turbines or their pumps, their facilities, pressurized equipment, it’s done through really the advancement of digitization, digital solutions, efficiency improvements is how we get there. And then really putting and ensuring, like, there’s a change management taking place. So, the way I like to say it is our greening by is essentially a customer’s greening of.
Jim: Yeah. That makes total sense as an automation supplier and all the digital technologies that we can help people in their journey through a number of different ways. Thanks for sharing that, Denka.
Bobby, with Texas being an energy hub for all of North America and even beyond globally, what does the energy landscape look like as we go forward?
Bobby: Well, in many ways, Jim, it will look much like the historic landscape and in other ways, it will look dramatically different. And here in Texas particularly, I think we are very clear that the challenge is, in fact, a dual challenge, which is to say we have to deliver reliable, affordable, and secure energy to the world today, while at the same time, dramatically driving down CO2 and other emissions. And if the challenge were just one of those two things, it would be quite a different proposition.
But in fact, the challenge is that we need to be able to walk and chew gum, which is to say we have to do both of those and we have to do them simultaneously. And so, a big part of the energy complex here in Texas will continue to be focused on the former, which is to say, just delivering reliable, affordable, and secure energy today to the world as it’s needed. And then there’s also a subset of companies who will be doing that and will be focused on truly new things. And there will also be a group of companies focused exclusively on innovation, new company formation, new forms of energy, and all the services that go around that.
And so, it’s really a very exciting time, but we have to remind ourselves that there’s no one silver bullet. Energy is truly a system or in fact, multiple systems that are highly, highly complex, and the challenges that we face are multifaceted. There are challenges of the physical world, of chemistry and physics. There are also challenges of the geopolitical world, security, and reliability. And then there are challenges of the consumer, which is to say that people who are using energy every day are simultaneously desiring, if not demanding, that it be cleaner and lower emissions, yet they also want it as cheaply and reliably as they can possibly get it.
So, you roll all that together and it means that the challenges are huge and complex, and likely to take a long time. But the good news is that we have a world that is increasingly focused on this challenge, and ultimately it’s our industrial companies like Jennifer’s companies and many, many others who will drive the change that’s needed for us to get to where we need to go, which is to say dramatically lower CO2 emissions to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.
Jim: Well, that does…that dual challenge there certainly presents a lot of challenges. But with the amount of people focused and all that brain power, there’ll be technology innovations, there’ll be a lot of things along the way that help us drive that way just by the sheer focus on the challenge there.
Jennifer, I guess the same question for you. How do you see the Texas energy landscape from your perspective as we go forward?
Jennifer: So, I think what Bobby said was spot on. I think for Texas… maybe to take one step back, this year with the Russia-Ukraine War really highlighted the need for energy security and we saw costs rise tremendously. And so, I mean that really hit at home for all of us in industry, especially those of us that are global companies watching that.
I think for Texas you do need…you need reliable, low-cost, but sustainable energy. And so, I think when we look at what we do as an industry, it’s got to be reliable, rateable energy. So, renewable energy’s wonderful. We love investing in it. I think it is absolutely important for our future. Battery storage isn’t where it needs to be yet today. So, I think you are going to need other sources of energy. So, I think it’s gonna be, I always call it lumpy. You’re gonna have a lot of different things moving, and I think Bobby said it very well, it’s going to take time.
So, I think about hydrogen. And so, we’re actually participating in a collaborative group with Chevron and with Air Liquide to bring hydrogen as a hub. So, infrastructure. Infrastructure takes time, it takes a lot of money, but I love the opportunity now that we can collaborate in this sustainability space. We collaborate more now, and I think that’s very exciting.
So, PetChem companies, because of IP, we didn’t always maybe collaborate as much, but we are today. And I think it’s really important that we’re doing this because there’s high cost and higher risk. So, if you can get supply and demand together, working together, it adds a little bit more comfort as you go through the infrastructure build or the technology improvements or driving new technology.
So, I mean, for me, I think you’re gonna see a big change. Hydrogen could be…it could be blue, it could be green. I mean, we’ll see what that looks like, but I do think that is an alternative way to look at energy. So, renewable energy, hydrogen as a source. And one other comment too, here in the Houston area, you’ve got a lot of olefin crackers. And a lot of them are cracking ethane because ethane is a lower-cost raw material. When you crack it, you do actually make a lot of hydrogen.
So, a lot of folks are starting to recycle their hydrogen to also cut down on the natural gas they’re using. So, I think people are getting smarter, they’re becoming more energy efficient, and I do think you’re gonna see a change over time. And I agree, Bobby, it’s gonna take some time. But if you have a lot of companies that are willing to collaborate, I think it allows for a much higher success rate going forward, and faster.
Jim: Yeah. I think that collaboration is everything. I mean, from a supplier standpoint of equipment to understand the challenges and move the technology along to help address that, and then some of the examples like recycling that hydrogen, with hydrogen being so promising an energy carrier there though, yeah, it’s…we’re on the train moving that direction, and it seems to be accelerating, which is great.
Denka, since a large part of our automation business is here in Texas, how do you see it, how we play in the Texas energy landscape, and how it’s evolving?
Denka: Yeah. So, I was saying that we’ve always been industrial leaders in aerospace, in healthcare, in oil and gas. And now really this energy addition, if you will, is where we take place as the frontier runners in the renewable sector. So, in 2022, Texas added 8,000 megawatts of solar and wind as well. California, just as a benchmark, was only 3000 megawatts.
So, we look at the amount of infrastructure and capital that’s being invested in the renewables, and then to what Jennifer said around the hydrogen hubs, that mix of who we’re working with and the companies that we’re working with. I mean, you see lithium refineries coming in place, Tesla has moved and big tech has moved into Texas in a very meaningful way. And with that, what do you get? You get a lot of startups, a lot of Cleantech companies moving in this space as well.
So, I like to put it into two ways. The industry has changed, and more importantly, I almost say, like, the talent demographic has changed.
And what do I mean by that? I don’t think people understand, like, Texas is the fastest-growing state in the rest of the country right now. Houston is the most diverse city, beating out LA and even New York. So, when it comes to thinking about what makes us special, we have 8 billion people in this world that need clean energy, that need reliable sources of energy, and the talent is here. So, in some ways, Texas is positioned to be the epicenter of how we actually enable other areas of the world to come and go green.
Jim: And I think Texas is a place that’s blessed with all forms of energy from the carbon-based ones that were being creative in how we remove the carbon or capture and sequester the carbon to the wind, the sunshine, and everything else in there. So, it seems natural that blessed with all this energy, that we lead the way in helping the world with how to reduce the carbon and all of that energy.
Bobby, let me turn to you. Can you share your views on the importance of partnerships in achieving these net zero goals?
Bobby: Well, the goal certainly will not be achieved without partnerships and collaboration. That’s very, very clear. And I would say it’s clear for two reasons. One is that, as I mentioned before, there’s no silver bullet here and we’re going to have to have progress across a very, very wide range of issues. And some of that has to do with technology, some of it has to do with markets, some of it has to do with customer preferences. But there’s a very wide range of issues that will require solutions. And no one company touches all of those, and no one regulatory body touches all of those for that matter.
So, almost by definition, we have to have collaboration and partnerships. But perhaps the even more important reason, and Jennifer touched on this earlier, is risk sharing I think is going to be really, really critical here. The IEA says we need to be spending call it $4 trillion per year globally every year between now and 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accords. We’re currently spending about $1 trillion globally. So, we’re $3 trillion a year short, and we’re whatever the number is, 28 years away. So, we’re talking about a lot of capital required here.
And there is no one company nor is there any one government that could possibly afford to pay for the majority of that. The capital is gonna have to come from everywhere. It will have to come from governments in the forms of R&D and grants, and tax incentives. And we’re doing a lot of that here now and the EU is close behind us. A lot of it is gonna have to come from the private capital markets true risk-taking where that…whether that’s at a venture capital level or a more traditional private equity level. A lot of it’s gonna have to come from the budgets of our big industrial companies who generate free cash flow and are gonna have to take some of that free cash flow and invest it in innovation and new products and new ventures.
And ultimately, and this is quite an unpopular thing to say, but I’m gonna say it, ultimately, it’s gonna have to come from us as consumers of energy. We’re gonna have to be prepared to help pay for the innovation and incremental cost that’s required to decarbonize quickly on the pace that we need to be on to make all of this happen. So, it is going to require collaboration and partnership across every corner of industry and every corner of our society, and every corner of government around the world.
This is a massive, massive undertaking because there’s a huge amount of inertia in energy systems. They are big and complex. We have to be able to leverage what we already have because completely replumbing the world’s energy systems is simply too expensive and it will take too long to have an impact on the problem, the climate change problem, in the way that we really need to. So, I’m a big believer in the importance of collaboration.
Jim: Yeah. When it extends to all of us, even as consumers, that’s everyone’s got a stake in this and everyone’s got… step up for their part of it.
Jennifer, I was fascinated reading through on your website about how your company will achieve your goal of ending plastic waste. Can you share more about the ways you’re tackling this goal?
Jennifer: Sure. So, we actually were a founding member of the Alliance To End Plastic Waste. And so, we have…we actually have a multi-pronged program. So, our goal is to get to 2 million metric tons of recycled product that we sell in the market. And it can be from chemical recycling, mechanical recycling, or a circular, like, renewable feedstock.
So, on the advanced recycling, we actually have our own technology, we call it MoReTec. The MoReTec technology takes hard-to-recycle plastic and it makes it into what we call pyrolysis oil. And that oil can then be cracked to create olefins that can then go into polymers.
We also look at things like JVs [joint ventures], we get involved with those as well, again, about the collaboration part that Bobby was talking about. So, we’ve invested in some JVs already, a state-of-the-art sorting units. One is in Germany with Source One Plastics. We are also part of a partnership in Houston to reduce the landfilling that’s going on with Exxon and Cyclyx.
So those are areas where we’re now trying to procure the recycled materials plastic bottles and whatnot to bring into our facilities to either, make pyrolysis oil out of or also expand into our current mechanically recycled programs that we have. We just signed a few more MOUs and LOIs with others so that we can also make more, we have one already QCP in Europe where we make mechanically recycled polymers.
So, we look at things like our Circulen brand that we’re trying to bring to market, working with our customers that really want it. They want to be able to say things are made out of recycled plastic. I think about the drink cups that a lot of the fast-food restaurants are now recycled plastic. So, the biggest issue there really is not the technology, it’s the collection of the plastic.
So, I think for us, again, talking about partnership, the way to make that happen is to partner with folks maybe that we wouldn’t have partnered with in the past and start trying to figure out how to solve that problem so that we can bring it into our sites and use it. So, I’m actually super excited to see us doing this and really expanding. We also on our leadership team, as we reorganized under Peter, we do have a circular and low carbon solutions business line. And I think that’s important so that we are more customer-facing to try and bring those solutions to customers and help them be more innovative as well.
Jim: Well, and that really brings that partnership aspect to life, all those different ways you described your working with others to do some of that. So, that’s really exciting from what Bobby said that you as a company are putting that into practice and really driving what you’re doing for more sustainable operations.
Denka, what role can we play in helping Lyondell and other companies in this?
Denka: Yeah. Jim, I sometimes think about, adding to what Bob and Jennifer said, we are in some ways the conduit to making sure that the alliance or the partnerships make sense. Like, we’re the vehicle. We ourselves don’t do the production. But I have never signed more three-way NDAs, I’ll tell you this much, between companies that are very similar to us. So, I think that there’s been a natural collaboration and a congregation in trying to do the right thing, which I have not seen in the last 10-plus years.
And, I think I’m very passionate actually around the greening with, Emerson’s greening with, in our ethos. And it means how do we work with OEMs, with maybe even competitors, dare I say it, but people who are in the same space of how we bring solutions to the Lyondells or to the other customers that we have.
And I go back to this, look one fundamental saying that I think it’s a Zambian proverb. If you run alone, you run fast. But if you run with others, you run far. And the whole purpose of what we’re doing is we want to run far, past a net zero goal, past what Wall Street is expecting. I think we owe it to our children and our children’s children, who are by the way, ready to pay for it.
I think Bobby touched on it is up to us as individuals to be able to say we will be able to maximize and make sure we are able to deliver those promises, but our next generation are willing to actually spend in that more efficient manner. So, I think I’ll conclude with this. I don’t think that the ecosystem or the partnerships are linear, which we’ve often thought about, but they’re in some ways almost like a bubble of moving the same way in the same direction in a very calculated manner.
And it’s almost the analogy, the fingers have a job, your body parts all have a job. But when you come together and you’re able to actually make the impact that is needed, it’s so much more meaningful. So, I think we have to think of sometimes putting the ego aside and understanding how can we come into alliances and partnerships in a very meaningful and calculated way.
Bobby: Jim, one thing I might add, if I might, to Denka’s comments is that an area of importance in the energy transition that probably doesn’t get enough airtime, if you will, is just that of efficiency gains and conservation. And, we can think a lot about alternative forms of energy. That’s one way of kind of getting out greenhouse gas emissions. But we can also think about more efficient operations that in fact conserve energy so that we don’t have to use as much of it to create the same amount of energy output in industrial activity.
And when I think of the business automation world and of Emerson in particular, your company is right at the heart of that. And I think that alone is sort of poised to make really, really big contributions to this whole effort. So, we need to remember and concentrate on the role that industry and industrial automation can and must play in the energy transition. And we’ll be counting on Emerson and your like-minded companies around the world to help us do that.
Jim: Yeah. One thing that’s really helping in this area is technology advanced and wireless communication has grown. It’s really the ability not just to instrument a plant to control it, but to really measure how are we doing energy-wise and others. So, more companies can take advantage of that. And creative engineers in our industry are figuring what are more things we can put devices and analytics and other things to help drive greater energy efficiency. So, I appreciate you bringing that up.
That’s something that we wanna make sure we’re continuing to advance the technology to make it easier and easier for people to be able to do that and drive their energy usage lower. I guess let’s wind down. This has been a great discussion, and I know that our listeners have gotten some, or will get some great things out of it.
I guess kind of a looking forward, Bobby, what progress do you see being made by the end of this decade?
Bobby: I think there’ll be tremendous progress across a whole range of areas, some of which we’re already sort of firmly on the path. So, for example, in the world of renewable power generation, I think we will continue to have very large expansions of wind and solar, and hydro, and geothermal, and other forms of renewable power generation. So, we’ve got great momentum there and we’re on our way.
I think the evolution of hydrogen is a really important component of this. The next three or four years is critical for the hydrogen world for us to get to economics that make both blue and green hydrogen possible and feasible and desirable. And then I think there’s a whole nother bucket of things that we will be doing at the end of this decade that we can’t even imagine today.
And much of that will come, I think, out of our DOE labs and our research universities. And those two things are real competitive advantages that America has versus the rest of the world and we need to put them to use and put them to use in a very big way between now and the end of the decade. So, I kind of go back to my original point, Jim, which is that there’s no silver bullet. This is going to take a little bit of progress across a million different things. In the aggregate, we can make a big difference. We can dramatically drive down CO2 emissions and live in a much cleaner, more sustainable world.
Jim: Yeah. I think that’s an excellent summation. And, just in energy storage alone, there may be some breakthroughs that we can’t even imagine now in the seven years we have left in this particular decade.
And Jennifer, I know that you said you’ve lifted, what, from 30% to 42%, what you’re gonna do by the end of the decade. But beyond what you said earlier, what do you see advancements as we close out this decade?
Jennifer: So, I mean, I think for us to get to 42%, and I think a lot of companies that look like us are very similar trying to do the same thing, it’s not just about energy efficiency. You actually have to do something holistically different. So, carbon capture carbon capture is one, hydrogen is another. So, I do see, I agree with Bobby.
I think, we have the Inflation Reduction Act, we have ways now that helps, I think, encourage this and support moving forward so that you do have, the right cost levels to make it work, hydrogen in particular. So, I actually do think by the end of the decade, you could see a lot of things starting to come online. And so, the other thing I think too is that I think as this starts to grow, it’s the beginning is always a little bit slow, but once you start to get to momentum, it really starts to take off.
So, for example, trying to get wells permitted, these types of things. Folks will start to see it and hopefully help us streamline it and make sure that we can do these things a little bit better, a little bit faster. So, I think by the time we get to the end of the decade, I think you will see a lot more renewable power. I agree with Bobby on that. I think hydrogen’s another one.
I’m excited about what technology’s going to be there that isn’t there today. Those are the things that are super exciting. I think energy storage would be great. So, that’s one where I really do hope we see even more significant advancements. But even for us in our labs, we’re looking at making products differently in the future than we make ’em today. And so, these things that we partner with universities as well. And so, I think the “not knowing yet what’s gonna be out there” is kind of super exciting to me.
Jim: Well, that’s also excellent summation. There are so many different things going on, and each of us and where we’re at have a big role to play with that. Well, I want to thank you all so much for sharing your time and your expertise with our listeners. And I know we look forward to doing our part in helping meet these lofty goals that we have before us and improve the quality of life we all enjoy again. So, thank you so much.
Bobby: Thanks.
Denka: Thank you. Thanks, Jim.
Jennifer: You’re welcome.
Denka: Thanks, Bobby. Thanks, Jennifer.
Bobby: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
-End of Transcript-
The global market for natural gas continues to grow in complexity and competitiveness. In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast edition, Martha Rendon joins me to discuss the role automation plays in driving greater operational efficiencies across the natural gas transportation and distribution supply chain.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the SCADA System for Energy and Transportation section on Emerson.com for technologies and solutions to better manage the evolving energy mix more safely, efficiently, and securely.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. I’m Jim Cahill, and welcome to another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Natural gas markets have gone global over the last several years. I’m joined today by Martha Rendon to discuss the challenges and solutions in natural gas, transportation, and distribution to address these changes and enable companies in the industry to operate more efficiently and sustainably. Welcome, Martha.
Martha: Hi, Jim. Glad to be here.
Jim: Well, it’s great having you here. I guess let’s begin by asking you to share your background and path to your current role here at Emerson with our listeners.
Martha: Sure. Okay. Well, I got my computer science degree a while back, and after that, I got my PMP certification. I project management professional certified, and I have been with Emerson working with Gas Management Solutions for 15 years now. It feels really like it was yesterday. And my role is a senior product manager and subject manager expert in commercial gas business and transportation process.
Jim: Wow. It sounds like, yeah, we’re all having a lot of fun around here with all the years we’ve been around. So let’s dive into it. How would you describe the commercial gas business and transportation process and what does that involve?
Martha: Well, the commercial gas business involves the production, exploration, extraction, processing, transportation, storage, and distribution of natural gas to various customers. The process begins with the search of natural gas deposits, followed by extraction using drilling techniques, and the gas is then processed to remove impurities, transport to processing facilities and storage or distribution centers, and finally delivered to customers through a network of pipelines, that is the commercial gas business. The commercial gas transportation process is something that is regulated by government agencies and companies must adhere to strict safety and environmental standards. The end goal is to provide customers with a reliable, safe, and cost-effective supply of natural gas.
Jim: Wow, that sounds pretty wide encompassing there. What is included in the gas pipeline business cycle spectrum?
Martha: The gas pipeline business cycle involves a series of interrelated activities that help ensure the smooth operation of the pipeline and transportation of gas. These activities include nomination management, confirmation, scheduling, allocation, balancing calculations, invoicing, and reconciliations with physical product. All these activities are subject to terms, conditions, and contractual obligations set forth by the transportation company and its shippers, and they help ensure that the pipeline operates safely and efficiently while allowing for maximum business acumen.
Jim: Well, that’s great background and got us all level set on everything. So what are customers’ primary concerns regarding the pipeline transportation business cycle?
Martha: Yes, customers of pipeline transportation and as well distribution and shippers’ companies have several concerns that are important to them. This includes safety, reliability, cost, capacity, schedule, environmental impact, and regulatory compliance. So first, when we talk about safety, ensuring the safety of people and the environment is a major concern as well as the availability of gas delivery. The cost of transportation is a significant concern as it can impact overall business costs and profitability. So customers also want to be assured that there is enough pipeline capacity to meet their needs and the pipeline schedules will be of obeyed to, and the environmental impact of pipeline transportation is increasingly important and customers want to ensure that their activities are sustainable and environmentally responsible. So finally, an important topic is cybersecurity and regulatory compliance, as noncompliance can result in significant penalties and damage to a company’s reputation.
Jim: Well, given all these concerns, how does automation, integration, and optimization benefit customers that are operating these natural gas systems?
Martha: One, the use of automation, integration and optimization in the natural gas systems can bring significant benefits to pipeline transportation companies and shippers. And the benefits include increased efficiency, improved safety, better utilization, enhanced decision-making, increased reliability, and better monitoring, and control. Automation can help streamline processes and reduce the risk of human error, while integration and optimization algorithms can provide better insights into asset utilization and support data-driven decision-making. So also automated systems can improve their reliability of natural gas systems and provide real-time monitoring and control leading to improve overall management and performance.
Our approach to automation, integration, and optimization focuses on increased connectivity and flexibility. We utilize the gas software solutions to automate the process, to integrate data in real-time, and improve the pipeline transportation business cycle. Our integrated solution, which includes our modern SCADA platform results in improved safety, network security, capacity optimization, and better management of pipeline operation. And this approach provides visibility into the pipeline activities and inventories which is allowing companies to better meet the customer needs. So our goal is to help gas shippers and private companies operate in safely and efficiently while accurately accounting and invoicing for that. Those are the most important things when we see automation, integration and optimization benefits for customers.
Jim: That’s a broad range of things that we can do to help ’em with those challenges. What software solutions does Emerson have available to support the commercial gas business for pipeline transportation, distribution, and shippers’ companies? And do these solutions also align with other pipeline modeling, simulation, and operational management solutions?
Martha: Well, yes. What we offer is a system-based approach that affords the necessary flexibility and agility to help customers stay ahead of changing dynamics in an ever-changing gas system and pipeline asset management environment. So we have different solutions. One of those is PipelineTransporter, PipelineTransporter developed by Emerson is a logistics and commercial management system for pipelines and local distribution companies. A transactional management tool. PipelineTransporter was designed to administer gas transportation contracts by handling nominations, generating schedules, balancing accounts, creating invoices, and more. The other product that we have, the other so far is TransactionManager. That is another gas transactional management solution that is available for shippers and pipeline operators in regulator or merchant markets worldwide.
We have as well, GasloadForecaster. GasloadForecaster uses historical data properties that can be analyzed with resolve used to predict the future market and gas network behavior. This is a system thinking and machine learning approach showing signs of growing prevalence in gas pipeline sector. And the software can be delivered as a cloud-based subscription, and provides short-term hourly, daily logs and results. Future gas load predictions can be made by a variety of sources for maximum reliability and accuracy. And these solutions are aligned with other pipeline modeling, simulation, and operational management solutions as well, like PipelineManager and PipelineStudio on any SCADA solution.
Jim: Well, that does sound like a broad range of software solutions across really the whole industry there. How do these software tools all relate to automating processes in commercial gas structures and transportation cycles?
Martha: Yes. With PipelineTransporter and TransactionManager, there are software designed to manage the commercial operation of pipelines by providing better transaction visibility, streamline the ability to meet legal, commercial, and operational objectives. The software allows for management of different aspects of the pipeline business, including data sets, business transactions, balancing rules, tariff, and more. So with the reliable source data certifications and allocations are tied to a SCADA and gas measurement system, and they bring the generation of invoices and make it easier for pipeline operators to manage the third-party access to us globally, users have access to real-time data with the solutions related to receive and delivery points that is volumes more allowing them to make informed decisions based on the information provided.
So when we see how this can be integrated, GasloadForecaster can be integrated with PipelineTransporter or Transaction Manager, and these three solutions are fully compatible with PipelineManager. That is our online pipeline simulation engine for operations management and leak and its protection. PipelineTransporter is the software that also integrates with PipelineStudio. PipelineStudio is a hydraulic simulation tool for safe, steady state and analysis of flow in pipelines. The integration of these systems ensures efficient and effective use of pipeline capacity and prevents operational violations, optimizing the pipeline transportation process.
Jim: Well. How is Emerson software helping gas shippers and pipeline companies improve their operations? And can the software be used in multiple SCADA platforms?
Martha: Our approach to automation, integration, and optimization is based on increased connectivity and agility. Our solutions which include link detection, predictive modeling, flow condition validation, capacity and nomination validations. All of these optimize under one business umbrella. So the use of a fully integrated solution results in improved safety, level security, optimization of capacity, imbalance management, hydraulic validations. This aligns with private modeling, simulation and operational management needs. So our solutions help the shippers and pipeline companies increase the disability into activities and inventories, connect with customers’ requirements, and efficiently, and accurately account for a wider value of growth. The system-based approach provides the necessary flexibility and agility to respond to changing gas systems and pipeline asset management environments. And regarding utilize question, of course, definitely our software can be integrated with any SCADA platform.
Jim: Okay. Now, I’ve asked you a bunch of questions around our software and systems solutions across the different segments of the industries. Let’s get more global here. What are the major themes in the global gas network industry and which ones are customers most concerned about today?
Martha: One of the topics is ensuring the safety and security of gas pipeline levels is of utmost importance globally. With emergence of new markets and an increase in the cyber-attacks, there is a need for updated regulations and standards, the level, the playing field. To meet these requirements and mitigate the risk of cyber-attacks, gas shippers and pipeline companies are turning to advanced security solutions that provide the real-time monitoring I was mentioning before, intrusion detections and response capabilities. These solutions also often employee encryption, access control, and firewalls to ensure and secure scientific data and protect against unauthorized access. So effective change management practices also play a critical role in reducing the risk of cyber-attacks by ensuring that security protocols are regularly updated and that any change are truly tested and documented.
Additionally, organizations can benefit from regular security audits, treat assessment and penetration testing to identify and remediate the potential risk factors. So by taking a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity and working closely with the trust partners, I see that gas shippers and pipeline companies can better protect their assets, minimize the risk of downtime, ensure reliable, secure delivery of gas to the customers. So that’s an important chain in the global gas and global industry now.
Jim: Yeah, cybersecurity is a critical concern in most industries, but I think particularly across, you know, the global gas industry given how spread out everything and the transportation part of it and everything else. So thanks for sharing that with our listeners. What’s the significance of natural gas in the global energy mix?
Martha: Yes. the natural gas transportation industry involves a series of regulated processes that are driven by the movement of natural gas from gathering systems to underground storage sites, to local distribution centers. These processes include commercial activities and I mentioned before nominations, scheduling, invoicing, balancing that must be reconciling with physical flows. So the rise of natural gas is a cleaner alternative to coal, has driven innovation in the commercial gas structures and the increased presence of newer products like hydrogen has put more pressure on the midstream energy sector.
Companies in this sector are working to optimize the capacity, storage, shipping practices, operational capabilities, and to ensure the success of their operations, shippers and pipeline operators are focused on safety, reliability security, public image. They are also seeing visibility into future supply and demand and overall performance to optimize their planning and execution of gas.
Jim: Okay. And I guess now turning a little bit more to sustainability, what role do you see the natural gas industry playing in the transition to a low-carbon economy? And how will Emerson’s software facilitate management of a wider mix of energy products?
Martha: The natural gas industry may play a role in facilitating the transition to a low-carbon economy by supporting the development of carbonization and storage CCOs as technologies, hydrogen and CCOs initiatives, and to reduce the carbon emissions from fossil fuels make them more environmentally friendly with these initiatives. Natural gas source hydrogen combined with carbon capture provides a massive opportunity to accelerate the hydrogen adoption around the world in the near and meantime, while ultimately transitioning to an increasing percentage of renewable or zero emission over the long term. So Emerson definitely is ready to provide and facilitate with our software in the different business and value chains for hydrogen. So we have different solutions that can be provided in order to facilitate this important transition to a low-carbon economy.
Jim: Well, yeah, the role of hydrogen growing and the role that natural gas plays in there with the carbon capture part of it, that’s a really good point there. So let’s start winding things down. I’ve had you in the hot seat, hitting you with all these questions. Do you have any final perspectives to share with our listeners about automating processes and commercial gas structures and transportation?
Martha: Yes. In summary, I can say that the natural gas pipeline industry is facing increased competition and regulation leading companies to adopt advanced software solutions to improve efficiency, safety, security, and regulatory compliance that is an important part. Emerson so far helps companies to have the real-time visibility into operations and inventory. We facilitate the execution of pipeline movements and better manage the imbalance and waste, this will result in increased efficiencies in the transmission and distribution of natural gas through the integration of the commercial and operational activities with overall business process. So that is the important perspective that we like to share about the automating process in the commercial gas pipeline and transportation.
Jim: Well, those are some great perspectives. And I guess finally, where can our listeners go to learn more about some of these solutions we’ve discussed?
Martha: Yes, you can go on the Emerson website, emerson.com/scadaforenergy. You’ll find interesting information there.
Jim: Well, that’s great. And in the transcript, I’ll add a hyperlink to that URL. Well, Martha, I wanna thank you so much for sharing your expertise with our listeners today.
Martha: Thank you. Thank you for the time and opportunity.
-End of transcript-
Podcast: Control Volumétrico, lo que necesita saber para cumplir con las obligaciones fiscales
Actualmente en México todos los contribuyentes que se dedican a la industria de hidrocarburos o petrolíferos deben cumplir con nuevas obligaciones fiscales de controles volumétricos.
En este episodio conversamos con nuestra ingeniera Esther Solano, especialista en soluciones basadas en software sobre qué significa el control volumétrico, qué implica esta regulación y qué consideraciones se deben de tener para estar en cumplimiento con este requerimiento del SAT.
Escucha el episodio ahora o haz click en el siguiente link para reproducirlo directamente en Spotify:
https://spoti.fi/3GJANUr
Webinar: Controles Volumétricos: ¿Cómo cumplir con las obligaciones fiscales?
Actualmente en México todos los contribuyentes que se dedican a la industria de hidrocarburos o petrolíferos deben cumplir con nuevas obligaciones fiscales en material de controles volumétricos. En esta sesión, especialistas de distintas áreas tecnológicas se unen para explicar el alcance de esta regulación y exponer una solución escalable que le permita el óptimo cumplimiento fiscal.
Infografía: Controles Volumétricos: Cumple la obligación requerida por el SAT
Según la Miscelánea Fiscal 2022 y el Artículo 28 del Código fiscal de la Federación (CFF) publicada en el diario oficial de la federación (DOF-2018), conozca los objetivos de esta regulación así como la solución integral que ofrece Emerson a los contribuyentes obligados.
Video: Conoce más sobre Controles Volumétricos y la solución de Emerson
¿Qué es esto del control volumétrico del que todo el mundo habla? Nuestra experta en soluciones basadas en software, Esther Solano no explica los objetivos y alcances de esta regulación, así como la tecnología, experiencia y experticia con la que cuenta Emerson para apoyarle en cada uno de los pilares de cumplimiento.
¡Reúnase con un experto!
Ofrecemos a nuestros clientes la oportunidad única de programar una reunión virtual en privado con nuestros expertos Emerson para resolver sus dudas sobre Controles Volumétricos.
Por favor, haga clic en el siguiente botón, elija el espacio en la agenda de nuestro especialista que mejor se adapte a su calendario y reserve al instante.
Laura Schafer (l), Juan Conchas (c), Jim Cahill (r)
Work on the WirelessHART standard began in 2004 and culminated in an introduction to the automation and instrumentation marketplace in 2007. Now nearly fifteen years later, the availability and diversity of wireless measurement and final control devices are impressive. Applications opportunities have expanded beyond process measurements to include HSSE (Health, Safety, Security & Environment), reliability, energy management, and sustainability, to name a few. See the Pervasive Sensing section on Emerson.com for many of these solutions.
As growth in wireless bandwidth consumption continues as more wireless devices are added, the need to look to the future for solutions is critical. You may have seen the news Emerson Ventures Makes Strategic Investment in Spearix to help advance their adaptive, multi-core radio processor that provides a system-level solution for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) wireless communication.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, I’m joined by Spearix Technology VP of Sales & Marketing Juan Conchas and Emerson VP & General Manager for Pervasive Sensing Laura Schafer. We discuss this technology and how it will meet the challenges of increased communications bandwidth, device energy consumption, and continued reliability.
Give the podcast a listen and visit the Spearix.com website for the whitepaper highlighted in our discussion and Emerson’s Pervasive Sensing web pages.
TranscriptJim: Hi, everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. Wireless technology has enabled amazing advances for everyone across the globe. While the technology is solid, there’s still room for improvement. Communication engineers battle with challenges such as WiFi coexistence, multipath fade, non-deterministic data reception, and obstructions. All that may affect reliability. You may have heard the recent news about Emerson’s corporate venture capital business investing in the Austin, Texas-based company, Spearix Technologies. Their adaptive multi-core radio processing technology provides a system-level solution for the Industrial Internet of Things or IIoT wireless communications. Today, I’m joined by Spearix Technologies’ Juan Conchas and Emerson’s Laura Schafer to discuss the technology and how Emerson looks to expand its IIoT technologies as part of its pervasive sensing strategy. Welcome, Juan and Laura.
Juan: Thank you for having me.
Laura: Thanks, Jim.
Jim: Well, it’s great that you’re both here. So, I guess to kick things off, Juan, let’s begin by asking you to share your background and path to your current role at Spearix.
Juan: Right. Thank you. So, thank you for having me, Jim, and I’m very happy to be here with Laura also. My background is technical. I’m a BSEE from MIT. And my first job out of school was at Maxim Integrated Products, which is now part of Analog Devices. And I was very happy to focus more on analog and mix signal early in my career. And I got exposed to customers very early on as an applications engineer. And so I decided to split my career into customer-focused marketing and business, as well as technical. So, my career has been half technical and half business the entire time. And I’ve worked for such names as Xilinx and Silicon Labs, Micron, Microchip, and most recently, Abracon, who is a supplier into the internet of things. My background is not wireless, and it seems ironic since I’m here at Spearix as a VP of sales and marketing. But my background is more wireline and high-speed communications. But I think I bring a fresh look at wireless, and that’s something that Spearix is doing is taking the tradition of wireless engineering and bringing in new tools and new technologies. And I’m happy to be here and discuss all of these things.
Jim: Well, that’s great. Widely varied background. It’s going to be really good for our discussion today. Laura, let me turn to you, and can you give us a little bit about your background and path to your current role?
Laura: Sure, Jim. So, I got my technical degrees from the Colorado School of Mines in chemical engineering. I got my bachelor’s and master’s. And then joined the oil and gas industry. I worked with oil and gas for 10 years upstream, and that’s where I got my first exposure to Emerson products. I was using a Micro Motion Coriolis meter to measure additive addition to frac fluid. So, that’s how I got introduced to Emerson. And then I joined Emerson in 2012 in a business development capacity. Got to really meet a lot of customers and see how they use Emerson products. In 2020, I joined our digital transformation group, and that’s where I really got into Emerson wireless and our WirelessHART technology that we offer. And since then, I’m now the vice president and general manager of pervasive sensing and connectivity in our measurement solutions group up in Minneapolis. And really happy to have Spearix with us today to talk about the technology that we’re excited to integrate into our products moving forward.
Jim: Well, that’s really great, the pervasive sensing and this wireless technology because that’s really a heart of a lot of this sensing, just to be able to get so much more and then make use of it in your digital transformation. So, Juan, let’s get into it a little bit. Let’s talk a little about radio frequency or RF adaptive diversity technology. How does this communications technology make wireless more reliable and predictable?
Juan: We have the intuition that wireless can only be pushed so far. Wireless as a physical connectivity suffers from things such as obstructions, multipath fade, reflections, interference, the wave can interfere with itself. And all of these things are subject to environmental conditions. And no matter how good a single connection is, there’s always something that can prevent it from being 99.999% or 100%. And so one of the ways that we are making wireless reliable is by adding what we call diversity into the mix. And we’re doing something unique that is part of our patent technology. We are applying multi-core RF. So, for the first time, we see a need to use more than a single radio, more than a single core. And what the multi-core RF does is it builds diversity by applying multiple modes of what we call frequency, time, and space. In other words, there is more flexibility when you have more cores, and the time-frequency space coordinates that you select to propagate that connectivity builds immunity. And as it builds immunity through the air, we call that gain. And so the multi-core radio regains capacity with gain by using diversity through the air.
Jim: Yeah, that sounds like, you know, even in biological systems, greater diversity means greater resilience. So, that’s really interesting there. Since we’re now recognizing that RF environments can be corrected using this diversity, what are the impending challenges that this technology helps solve?
Juan: Yeah. So, there are impending challenges. Probably the biggest one is interference, or what the industry is calling coexistence. We haven’t seen enough coexistence issues yet because, as much wireless as has been deployed in the industry, it’s not a 100% ubiquitous. And the promise of the IoT, the industrial IoT is just a subsection of it. The promise of the IoT is that we are going to have hundreds, thousands more wireless devices around. And all of these devices are contesting for airspace, and bandwidth, and spectrum. And that is going to inevitably create interference problems. And so what the diversity does is it addresses the fact that interference is location, frequency, and time-based. It’s not constant throughout. And if you can discern the best way to apply those things, you can solve the interference problem.
The next challenge that’s coming is planning and placement. So, the IoT cannot be isolated to certain conditions, to certain spaces. There may be sensors that need to be at ground level, there may be sensors that need to be up high or behind a set of obstructions. They might be mobile. Because of all of those infinite ways that sensors need to be deployed, in order for a ubiquitous system, in order for a system to really have the freedom and the degrees of freedom that it needs in order to be ubiquitous, then you have to release it from this planning constraint. And so space is, you know, where something is located is another challenge.
Third is a challenge of longer and more predictable battery life. Longer and more predictable battery life means that you need to have a consistent reliability of your wireless. If your wireless tends to retransmit much more often than it’s supposed to or much more often than you expect, then you actually shorten the battery life. And so predictability of the wireless and the wireless reliability becomes important so that you can actually plan, you know, how much battery do you need? How long is this sensor going to take? If your sensor life falls short, then you have unplanned maintenance that you have to do, go replace batteries or take the sensor down. If the sensor doesn’t operate long-term enough, battery life is becoming one of the most important things.
Jim: Yeah, that makes sense that, you know, if you have to keep retrying your work in the…it’s having to communicate out you’re burning battery doing that. So, yeah, I can see that predictability being an important thing. So, Laura, the future of industrial IoT may rest in solving this interference, and the sensor placement, and density, as well as increasing battery life. What do you think is the business impact on industrial installations as these capabilities are expanded and ready for the future?
Laura: Yeah, so customers have not run into these issues quite yet. We are anticipating that as customers are going through their digital transformation and have to instrument more and more spots in their facility, they need wireless. They need wireless to do this. And for many customers, they’ve dropped in maybe an initial network, the initial set of devices, but many customers need lots, lots more devices. And as they do this, there are challenges that we know are on the horizon that we want to be in front of with this technology that Spearix is bringing to the table by offering that increased reliability to make sure that the signal gets through the first time and you don’t have to retry to get that signal through. That’s going to help the reliability, not just of the signal but of the battery life also, as Juan mentioned. So, I think that by working with Spearix, we’re getting ahead of these challenges that customers will have as they put more and more wireless in.
Jim: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s just that every device, everything out there is becoming smarter and smarter and wanting to communicate and say what’s going on. So, to sit here today and look at how much it’s instrumented, just looking out five years from now, it could be way more just because of so many more smart things in the plant, especially as we move towards more autonomous operations.
Laura: Absolutely.
Jim: So, Juan, how is this technology independent of spectrum, protocol, or bandwidth? And what are some of the wireless standards that it’ll work with?
Juan: You know, one of the challenges that was posed to Spearix when we first started working with Emerson as an industrial partner is the need for backwards compatibility and the need to be able to just roll into what has already been taking place over the last 10, 20 years in wireless. And as Laura said, this is a future need. It’s not necessarily here yet. So, in preparation for that, we can’t overhaul the network in order to accommodate this new technology. So, we had to come up with a solution that was backwards compatible and spectrum compliant or compatible with the same spectrum. We don’t want to jump to a new spectrum either. Many wireless technologies, especially in the startup phase, they have a tendency to require a new protocol or a new spectrum. And we definitely wanted to avoid that.
So, in doing that, we adapted our technology very naturally. It naturally adapts to this, to meet backwards compatibility in protocol. Any protocol actually will work. We can apply our radius diversity to any protocol. There are some protocols that will benefit much more than others, like narrow band and battery-operated low power, which is exactly what IoT and industrial sensors need. But synchronized networks, especially, and, in fact, WirelessHART, which is the preferred standard within industrial was a shoo-in for what we’re doing. So, WirelessHART works very well. WirelessHART happens to be IEEE 802.15.4-based solution. So, it shares a lot of commonalities with other high-volume standards that are also in the 2.4 gigahertz space, such as Thread, Zigbee, and eventually BLE.
But as I mentioned, we can also be backwards compatible to other protocols such as LoRaWAN or some of the sub-gigahertz like Wi-SUN, etc. We really are independent of the protocol itself. We just have to apply our technology to it. We’re also independent of spectrum, so 2.4 gigahertz and 800 megahertz, 900 megahertz, sub-gigahertz will also work with us. And in the future, many, many other standards could be 5 gigahertz or even higher frequencies.
Jim: So that flexibility is pretty powerful, especially the backward compatibility for all the years that the wireless devices have been out there. So, Laura, what was it about the Spearix technology and their team that made us want to make a capital investment in the company through Emerson Ventures?
Laura: Yeah, the backwards compatibility is incredibly important because we’ve got over half a million devices out there ourselves already communicating WirelessHART. So, the ability to take the additional reliability and potentially additional range that the Spearix intellectual property offers and provide that backwards into existing networks is incredibly exciting. So, backwards compatibility for one. Of course, all the value messages that the technology brings on range and battery life and reliability are very important. So, that’s one of the primary reasons was jumping on that intellectual property and helping guide the team into deployment of this in an industrial environment was, first and foremost, why we wanted to jump on this.
The team, of course, they bring a lot of experience on how to deploy this, and they’re bringing expertise on WirelessHART as well to the table so we can work with them to make sure that this is the right solution for our customers. We are very interested about the application to other protocols as well, other environments. There’s definitely substantially more volume in the commercial markets. So, adapting this technology into the commercial markets offers a tremendous opportunity for folks, you know, beyond just our industrial customers.
Jim: Yeah. And if you look at how digital transformation and other things, you know, it’s you’re getting a blurring of worlds anyway that there’s a lot going on in the commercial space with sensors and other things in the industrial space in there. So, yeah, I see that. So, Laura, with the current portfolio of intelligent devices communicating with each other and host systems with WirelessHART, the mesh-based communications technology, how will the mesh combined with Spearix adaptive diversity technology help to increase communications capacity, visibility, and reliability?
Laura: Sure. So, down the line, we need to continue to work with our engineering team and with Spearix to reduce the cost of wireless infrastructure. And by deploying this technology, we’re going to be able to potentially extend the range for WirelessHART communications between where we put our access point, where the devices are. So, as we increase range, we are also looking to increase the total device count that can be handled on an access point. So, a customer that in the past might have needed many access points to bring in a few thousand devices can get away with fewer access points, reducing their overall infrastructure cost to deploy a wireless network. So, ultimately, we’re going to be reducing that cost for our customers and helping wireless be deployed truly pervasively because it’s not been pervasively taken up to date.
Jim: Yeah. So it sounds like lowering the infrastructure costs of it and actually extending the maintenance because if these are more efficiently communicating and not having to retry, retry, retry kind of thing, longer battery life, so, yeah, there’s a lot of good in that. So, Juan, I was recently reading the white paper you released on the website about the RADiS wireless physical layer solution. Can you give our listeners some insight on how it discerns the environmental radio frequency conditions and adaptively controls RF communications?
Juan: Sure. Thank you for asking that, Jim. The white paper is available on our website, Spearix.com. What we are able to discern is, as data starts coming in, because we have diversity, we’re able to discern what we call colored packets. So, when packets come in, they don’t come in a 100% clean. Some of them are colored with things that are environmental, such as obstructions, such as reflections, or other environmental conditions. As those packets come in, we consolidate them on the back end and then make decisions based on those environmental colored packets. And those decisions led us adaptively tune our time frequency space coordinates of the multi-core radio in order to more effectively cut through those aggressors. And we’re able to go through aggressors that a single radio core cannot go through.
And the best example is, for example, coexistence. Coexistence, as Laura has mentioned, it will be a big problem if it’s not dealt with. And so many ubiquitous radios or wireless are all contending for the same spectrum. We can tell when a packet comes in. If it’s hindered a lot by interference, we take a look at that channel, or it could even be that time slot, or it could even be that space connection between one core and another core on our wireless, and we can jump to a different time space or frequency space coordinate, for example, where those packets are not colored by that interference. So, we have much more flexibility to make those decisions than single-core wireless does. A single-core wireless basically has to live with its own frequency space, or time-space, or frequency. It only has one choice of frequency, basically. So, because of the diversity that we built, we’re able to jump to different time frequency space coordinates that can cut through either the interference or whatever other aggressor is out there and build back that diversity for that channel.
Jim: It’s kind of playing air traffic controller and say, “Okay, we need to skip over here. This will be better for us.” That’s really cool. So, how does this adaptive diversity technology reduce communication packet error rates, you know, reducing those retransmissions, which helps with battery life?
Juan: One of the challenges with wireless today is that there’s really only one way to rebuild that channel capacity because a single core only has one option. And when the packet doesn’t make it, it needs to retransmit. So, the retransmissions are actually hindering battery life because there is no guarantee that the next retransmission is going to make it, and then the next retransmission might fail again. So that wireless doesn’t really have any idea or can’t really compensate to make sure that the retransmission has a much higher likelihood of making it. So, the way that our diversity builds or lowers power is by making sure that at any given point, it uses the best time-frequency space channel or coordinate that has the highest likelihood to make it through. And by relying on that highest likelihood, then the likelihood of needing another retransmission is much lower.
So, even if that time frequency space coordinate or channel requires slightly more power, it still saves power by overcoming the aggressors in the air. And then we also have data, and it’s in the white paper. We also have data that shows if you use the right time frequency space combination, you can actually get away with lowering the transmit power. So, you save power, not only because you become more reliable with fewer retransmissions, but your overall transmit power can actually become lower, something on the order of 10X lower. So, you can imagine that your battery life can be highly extended. It also has the benefit of quieting down the entire network because each RF link knows where to operate as far as optimal connectivity and optimal likelihood for the packet to go through without screaming up at a very high dBm, which is what most wireless just does today is…
Laura: Crank it up!
Juan: …cranking to the highest. Listen to me, listen to me. Yes.
Jim: It’s just a fascinating technology. So, Laura, how do we envision applying this technology in our products?
Laura: Sure. We’d like to start by putting it into our access points. That is the first place where we can maximize impact to the customer. By simply changing out an access point in an existing network could have a step change in reliability and potentially distance as well. So, that’s the first place that we would see to do it. Then we would look at adapting the technology into next-generation devices as well to get the benefits on both sides of the transmit and receive and just build a substantially more reliable network across the board. So, start with the access point and then move towards the devices.
Jim: Okay. I’ll save the when question for a future podcast then as this develops and go forward there. So, Juan, what are some of the performance gains in this technology over what we have today?
Juan: Sure. Another great question. Jim, thank you. So, we see the technology as mining capacity where a single-core radio or single-core wireless does not have the option to select an arbitrary or more time-frequency space channels to go through. The more cores you add, the more flexibility you have in choosing that time-frequency space coordinates. You could choose 4, or if you have more cores, you can choose 8 or 16. And thereby, mining capacity or having much more capacity than a single core can take advantage of. That capacity can be used either to improve overall data rate, or it can be used to improve battery life. You transmit at lower power, that’s one aspect of it, or higher reliability, fewer retries. So, it’s all two sides of the same coin, even though I just mentioned multiple sides.
But once you understand that you’re taking advantage of more capacity than a single RF core can take advantage of, then you’re free to optimize your performance. So, there should be gains in distance, there should be gains in reliability, there should be gains in power consumption. Where you should apply this is in contestant environments that are very hostile to wireless signals and that require extended battery operation. So, if you look at our white paper, you’ll see that we make a case for, in most cases, transmitting with very low power, 1/10th the power, and you still get 96% reliability or 96% throughput on any given packet. And so we see that as a big gain for wireless.
Jim: Yeah, it certainly sounds like there’s a number of different dimensions where you get that performance increase. That’s been a fascinating discussion. Let’s wind it down here. Laura, are there any closing thoughts or things you want to add for our audience that we haven’t talked about?
Laura: Well, I think just in general, we’re really excited about the future of wireless for our customers. There are so many more points that need to be measured, especially as we just came through COVID. We’ve got a lot of customers who realize the need to provide more data to folks who are working remotely to automate operator rounds and give us visibility into the maintenance or monitoring applications that just have never had the attention in the past. So, we see big growth for wireless in the future. And improving the reliability at the battery life, etc., is where investments in companies like Spearix are really important to move the technology forward. Now, we see this for the industrial environment, but the technology that you guys are bringing to the table has tremendous opportunity for commercial and residential applications as well. So, we’re really excited to be partners moving forward and help get you the exposure to some of these other markets as well. But really excited to have this opportunity to speak with you as well, Jim. There’s so much to be excited about in wireless.
Jim: Yeah. And it just seems like, you know, at the recent Emerson Exchange talk of autonomous operations, and it just seems like you’ll have to have way more sensing, way more things going on the more you can move down that path towards autonomous operations. So, Juan, how do you envision this technology unfolding over the next several years?
Juan: So, you know, very new technology. We are just getting started in understanding what this technology can do. I mentioned we’re mining capacity. I mentioned multi-core wireless. I think we started with the right partner. I think that, you know, the leader in industrial wireless is probably the premier first mover of what this technology can bring. So, thank you for partnering with us. But that’s only the start. I think that there are many things that can happen once you understand that multi-core wireless actually can do things that a single-core can’t. You know, we’ve been already discussing internally also with Emerson that it might even change the wireless game from a dB race, where it’s dBm sensitivity, dBm output power, and it’s all about cranking up the power and cranking down the sensitivity and that makes a better link.
We don’t know that that’s the right way to go anymore. It might actually be more coarse rather than a dB race. So, it might change the way that wireless is designed. There’s also this aspect of today we have to go after very high-end applications that really require or really benefit from the reliability, right? Industrial is a great example, especially moving forward as wireless becomes ubiquitous. You know, industrial, at some point, in the next five years, had to address the new coming challenges with something. We’re glad to help. But as Moore’s Law and other things take over, we believe that the other more volume-driven markets, like home automation and maybe even consumer markets will be able to benefit from this technology. So, you know, we’re starting at the very high end of the requirement. And eventually, everybody should be able to use some form or another of a multi-core RF processor.
Jim: Yeah, it just seems like if we get all these smart devices whispering to one another, the battery life’s going to extend and plus lower all the EMF that’s floating around all among us. So that sounds like a great thing. Well, I want to thank you both so much for sharing your thoughts with our listeners and viewers today. And I guess if you want to learn more about the technology or read the white paper that we alluded to, visit the Spearix website at S-P-E-A-R-I-X.com. Thanks, everyone, for joining us.
-End of transcript-
Pipelines are instrumental in moving energy around the globe. Offshore Technology cites some statistics.
The total length of the global trunk/transmission pipeline network is 2,034,065.0 km (with start years up to 2023), according to GlobalData’s latest report.
Of this total length, crude oil pipelines constitute 379,000.4 km [235,500 miles], petroleum products pipelines constitute 267,289.6 km [166,086 miles], natural gas pipelines constitute 1,295,563.6 km [805,026 miles] and NGL pipelines constitute 92,211.8 km [57,298 miles].
It is paramount to continuously monitor these pipelines for safe, reliable, and sustainable operations. In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, I speak with Emerson’s Greg Morrow to discuss how real-time transient models (RTTM) in the PipelineManager software application help pipeline companies maintain high-performance levels.
Listen to the podcast and visit the Software for Energy Transportation & Storage section on Emerson.com for more on advanced leak detection technology to help you achieve safer, more sustainable operations.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone, this is Jim Cahill with another “Emerson Automation Experts” podcast. Today we’re discussing the importance of models and modeling in making transportation via pipelines safer and more reliable. I’m joined by Emerson’s Greg Morrow to discuss why this is so and how to drive improvements in your operations. Welcome, Greg.
Greg: Hi Jim. Glad to be here.
Jim: Well, it’s great having you here. Well, let’s jump right into it and let me ask you to share your background and path to your current role with us here at Emerson.
Greg: Okay. Well, I got my doctorate in physics a while back. I did my work in particle physics up at Fermilab in Chicago and after that I got a job working in pipelines, pipeline simulation. And I’ve been with Emerson, or our predecessor company working with RTTMs for a long time now, 25 years. It doesn’t feel that long every day, but that’s how long it’s been and my role is really as leak detection subject matter expert.
Jim: Well that’s great background. Thank you so much for that. Well, let’s get into it about, you had mentioned RTTM, What exactly is RTTM?
Greg: Okay, that stands for real-time transient model and let’s unpack that. Model is a representation of something. I can get very philosophical about what all that actually means, but at its core, a model is a representation of something. In this case, it’s a sophisticated physics and mathematical representation of a pipeline, in some context, this is called a digital twin.
Transient means, that it takes into account that things are changing. And this contrasts with steady state, which assumes that everything is constant. And real-time means that it’s based on measurements from instruments in the field, which can be live or recorded. And it’s really important part of a good RTTM, that you’re able to play back that recorded instrument data for tuning purposes and analysis.
Jim: So how does the RTTM fit into our PipelineManager software application?
Greg: So it’s the core of our high-performance leak detection system. And so the key to that is it’s an accurate representation of exactly what’s happening on the pipeline. So in addition to leak detection, it’s also used to manage the pipeline and that’s features like batch tracking or scraper tracking, DRA [drag reducing agents] tracking, hydraulic monitoring like MAOP [maximum allowable operating pressure] alarms, hydrate formation warnings, and natural gas systems, and so on from there.
Jim: So is the PipelineManager application something to be used with gas or liquid pipelines?
Greg: Both. So the key there is the equations of motion are the same regardless. The only difference is the equation of state. The equation of state is a relationship for a fluid where you determine the density in other properties, from the pressure and temperature, and some defined parameters for the fluid. We have different equations of states for all sorts of fluid, from the API correlations for crude and refined products to NGLs, to GERG 2008 for natural gas, that’s well known as the most accurate equation of state for natural gas. So, both liquids and gases, anything you’ve got.
Jim: Well, that’s great. Covers the whole gamut. So how difficult is this application to apply?
Greg: So the RTTM is very complete. So it does have a lot of things you can modify or fine-tune, ground thermal properties, instrument filters and so on, and so forth. But what’s key to understand is that the defaults are widely applicable. So we ship with a bunch of different types of ground and you can use one of those, and it’ll be pretty good. Out of the box, your leak detection system’s going to be accurate, sensitive, reliable and robust, but it also rewards deeper attention to detail. And we call this tuning.
Jim: So for this application, what’s required from an instrumentation standpoint?
Greg: So the RTTM has a minimum set of required instruments and for our purposes, it’s basically pressure, and flow at every inlet, and outlet, and pressures it pumps, and regulators that can change the pressure from the other side of the pipeline, but more instrumentation is better. So in the case of pressures, putting a pressure instrument on an intermediate valve at a river crossing or something like that is helpful. Smaller segments tend to make the model more sensitive. Sensor quality is also a factor. If your pressures report by exception at 0.1 bar, which is a pretty big step, you’re not really going to get good results, modeling slow drifts and sharp transients. Temperatures are also very important depending on the fluids you transport. Some of them like gas can be extremely sensitive to temperature. So good temperature measurement is important.
Can also have fluid property sensors like density or viscosity, or real-time composition measurements like gas chromatographs that tell you, for example, this batch of fluid has a lot of extra ethane in it or something like that. Then you also can use instruments to support other features. Like if you’re doing scraper tracking, you’re gonna need scraper sensors to tell you when the scraper is launched and where it passes, and so forth. So all of those things play into the development of the model. And one of my remarks is often, I won’t turn down extra instrumentation. More instrumentation is almost always better, but again, out of the box, the RTTM is gonna work with the instrumentation you have as long as you meet that minimum set.
Jim: Now, you had mentioned that more measurements can help with the tuning of these models. So what role does tuning play in the models?
Greg: So, again, I could wax philosophical about this. You can catch me offline and I’ll be happy to talk with you about it. But for just very briefly, tuning is changing the parameters of the model to achieve greater correspondence with reality. So, you look for places where the model doesn’t show what’s happening in reality. So for, you know, something that’s not unusual is when you turn on a pump, get a pressure surge, and the fluid reacts in the model slightly differently than the fluid reacts in reality. So, you do something like modify the fluid composition or the pipe wall thickness or the thermal conductivity of the ground or some other parameter to make the model correspond better in that place where it’s not.
So, as a practice, a lot of tuning is actually understanding the instrumentation. That’s both the instrument quality itself, as well as the SCADA data acquisition properties like the “Report by Exception” that I mentioned, and also, what part of the pipeline the instrument applies to. For example, if a pressure’s upstream of pipeline equipment versus downstream of some pipeline equipment, like I said, the valves or something like that, that can make a difference in part.
And understanding that helps you get the model accuracy to match reality. Because the RTTM is the most sophisticated model of the pipeline possible, you can get it extremely close to reality, which helps your leak detection achieve the best sensitivity, reliability, robustness, and accuracy. And this can be an ongoing process built into your process of continual improvement.
Jim: Well, that’s interesting. I noticed that that’s the second time you talked about sensitivity, reliability, and some of those other things. Is there a reason for that?
Greg: So, those are terms from API 1130, which is a document that discusses computational pipeline models or CPM, like the RTTM. And they’re particularly useful terms for evaluating leak detection systems. Sensitivity is how small a leak you can detect and how fast. Robustness is your ability to detect a leak no matter what pipeline conditions there are, like, steady-state or transient, shut-in, slack, supercritical, and so forth.
Reliability is how much you trust the system’s alarms. If it gives a lot of false positive alarms or misses true events it should have caught, it’s not as reliable as if it’s an alarm is always completely correct. And accuracy is how accurate the system is in determining things like leak size and location. The transient part of RTTM, Real-Time Transient Model, is the biggest part of the robustness of the leak detection system because modeling things as they’re changing is the biggest part of ensuring that you get sensitivity regardless of what the pipeline is doing.
How sophisticated and well-tuned the model is, determines how sensitive it can be. Sensitivity and reliability are often in a bit of a trade-off so if there’s a certain amount of uncertainty built into the model that just because the models cannot be perfectly accurate. If you push on the sensitivity, you’re gonna push yourself in the direction of that uncertainty and you’re going to generally get more false positives.
On the other side, if you say, I cannot tolerate any false positives and some customers, that’s the rule, then in order to make sure that you’re above that sort of underlying irreducible systematic uncertainty, then your sensitivity is gonna be somewhat higher. And this trade-off is really exacerbated by the statistics of small numbers. So, if a leak is one in a million and you’re 99.99% reliable, you’re still going to have 100 false positives for every time you have a real leak. Reliability is a big part of our ongoing R&D. Machine learning and statistical models can really help here.
One of the interesting challenges is, of course, because of those statistics of small numbers where false positives are just sort of inherently more likely than true positives. You can, if you do it naively, accidentally train your system that any potential alarm is false and just throw it away. You’ll be right 99 times out of 100, but you also won’t have a functioning leak detection system. So, this is one of the interesting problems that we’re investigating. As scientists, interesting problems are the ones that really get us into work in the morning.
Jim: Well, it’s fascinating that trade-off and that the numbers involved in that where you can still have all those false positives even with that level of reliability. So, given the criteria that established in some of those standards, how does the RTTM measure up?
Greg: Very good question. Among CPM systems, the RTTM is sort of universally understood to have the overall best score. That’s not to say that other systems don’t have their advantages. Other systems may excel in one area, negative pressure wave or NPW systems are by far the most accurate for leak location, for example. But NPW systems are not particularly robust or reliable. The RTTM is a standout for covering all four corners thoroughly. It’s also good to have complimentary systems. In fact, it’s often required by regulatory bodies.
And PLM [PipelineManager] includes several complimentary systems like RuptureSentinel, and it can also integrate with third-party complementary systems. So, whatever your needs are, we’re likely to help meet them. PLM also helps you develop key performance indicators, KPIs, for your system as well. One of our apps is specifically aimed at this, the leak detection performance analyzer. So, we’re really there to support your Leak Detection Program Management.
Jim: Now, I know we’re not the only RTTM available in the marketplace. So, how does our PipelineManager application stand out from others in the industry?
Greg: Not all RTTMs are the same. They differ in what’s included in the model and the mathematical method used to solve the model equations. Basically, the details that I’m not going into here. A really simple one is just how you calculate the transfer of heat from the pipeline to the ground. You can do that a bunch of different ways and the RTTMs vary in that sort of details. They offer differ in what you do with the output of the model.
So, the output of the hydraulic model is an exact representation of what’s happening on the pipeline. And what you do with that can also vary how, for example, you determine whether there’s a leak alarm or how the batches are moving through the system, etc. So, RTTM stands out for its thoroughness. We’ve used as much physical rigor as possible to ensure the greatest accuracy possible in the hydraulics.
It stands out for our experience and expertise. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and that’s given us a lot of opportunity to hone the performance of the model as well as the services we provide implementing PipelineManager to meet your needs. And it stands out in terms of performance. We’ve won a number of head-to-head competitions where we’ve demonstrated greater performance in those four API criteria.
And it stands out in terms of features. It’s not enough to have “batch tracking” you have to provide batch tracking that meets the pipeline operator’s requirements, whether that’s calculation of interface volume or providing actual volume corrections for commercial applications. It’s not just batch tracking, of course, we have the widest selection of pipeline management features no matter what your needs might be.
Jim: Well, that’s a really good overview. I liked how it started that it could be applied right out of the box and then you have the flexibility to improve the accuracy of the model just based on how you’ve instrumented it. I guess before we close things down, do you have any final perspectives to share with our listeners about RTTMs?
Greg: So, as you just said, out of the box, PLM’s gonna give you good leak detection. And the reward of a continual improvement process is world-class leak addiction performance in all four sectors of sensitivity, reliability, robustness, and accuracy. And even though leak detection is very important, you’re not going to be dealing with leaks every day, or if you are, you have other problems than the software.
You’re going to be operating your pipeline every day. Your controllers are gonna be busy doing controller things, shipping fluid to this location or that location. PipelineManager helps you do that. Whatever it is that you’re doing, we’ll help you understand what’s going on your pipeline better than anybody else in the market.
Jim: Well, I know we’re only able to scratch the surface in this podcast. So where can our listeners go to learn more?
Greg: So, we have a four-part webinar series and anybody can go to www.emerson.com/leakdetectionwebinars. And you’ll be able to go through all of those sessions and get a more in-depth view of our products and what they can do for you. You can also visit www.emerson.com/scadaforenergy to access more information on PipelineManager, as well as our entire suite of energy, transportation, and storage software offerings.
Jim: Well, that’s great. And I’ll add hyperlinks around those in our transcript that we include with the podcast. Well, Greg, I wanna thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your expertise with our listeners today.
Greg: It’s always a great pleasure to talk to people about this. And again, feel free to contact me offline. I’m happy to discuss all of this. And you can see me at conferences and especially our Flow User conference every year.
-End of Transcript-
One of the pillars of the globe’s path to decarbonization is electrification. Lithium-ion batteries play an essential role across many segments, including transportation. But what about the limited lifespan of these batteries?
That’s where a company like Li-Cycle comes to help. Their unique recycling process takes spent batteries and waste from the battery production process back to elements and compounds that can be reused in the battery production process.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, I’m joined by Li-Cycle’s Chris Biederman and Emerson’s Nathan Pettus to discuss how the collaboration between the companies is helping to bring the process online sooner and enable scaling for future recycling processes across the globe.
TranscriptJim: Hi everyone. I’m Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast. Electrification is one of the critical pillars in moving toward a more sustainable future. For example, moving from internal combustion engines, powering vehicles to electric motor and lithium battery-based vehicles. The demand for lithium continues to snowball, and the battery production process and limited lifespan of lithium batteries potentially means a lot of waste. That’s where lithium recycling comes into play.
Today I’m joined by Li-Cycle Chief Technology Officer Chris Biederman and Emerson’s Process Systems & Software president Nathan Pettus to discuss the challenges in recycling lithium and other component metals in these batteries and the role of automation and industrial software in driving safe, reliable, and efficient operations. Welcome, Chris and Nathan.
Nathan: Hi, Jim. Great to be here.
Chris: Thank you.
Jim: It’s great to have you both. Let’s get started. Chris, can you give us a little bit of your background and the genesis of Li-Cycle?
Chris: Yeah, sure. First, thanks for having me today. And I’ll start with the genesis of Li-Cycle. So as a company, we were started back in 2016. Our co-founders, Ajay Kochhar and Tim Johnston, were involved in the lithium industry. They both worked at that company called Hatch. They were involved in the project space in lithium, and they noticed that there was a, at least at that point in time, a fairly significant forecast of electric vehicles.
And they looked at that and said there are a lot of raw materials that go into making the cells for batteries, but there was no viable solution at the time for what happens when those lithium-ion batteries reach their end of life. They give them credit, took a risk, and said we want to come around this idea of electrification and we want to play in that space and be part of it.
And so they formed Li-Cycle. They developed what we now know is our core Spoke & Hub business model. And we’re now seeing in 2022 a drastic increase in electrification, cell production, and all these different project announcements. So Li-Cycle is actively involved in this space and how I fit in. I’m a chemical engineer.
I’m our Chief Technology Officer, so I’m responsible for all of our capital projects globally as well as research and development at Li-Cycle and our intellectual property portfolio. So I get to play in anything technology.
Jim: That’s a great background, and I know I’m going to hit you up with some questions about the Hub & Spoke and that kind of thing as we get into it a little bit. So thanks for that. Nathan, can you give a little bit of your background and your path with Emerson?
Nathan: Sure. And like Chris said, I’m really happy to be here. Jim, thanks for letting you have the opportunity to share some of our work we’re doing with companies like Li-Cycle. My background with Emerson, I’ve been with Emerson for about 20 years, 23 years exactly. Actually almost always in the systems automation part of the business. So helping control and automate facilities like Chris’ and I actually started in the company as a software developer.
So like him, I’m a techie at heart, mechanical engineer. Didn’t really ever do any mechanical engineering though. Got into controls and software pretty early in my career. And then at some point got my MBA and got into this dark side of sales and marketing and done a lot of things inside Emerson. Run a lot of different parts of the business, but as I said, always within the automation of systems and software business. Really happy to be here today. Can’t wait to talk a little bit about recycling lithium.
Jim: Thanks for that, Nathan. It’s a real dangerous bunch. We got a chemical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and I’m an electrical engineer by background, also on the dark side of marketing. So yeah, this should be fun.
Chris, I was watching some of the news updates on CNBC and it was interesting how the lifecycle management of batteries was a to have around 10 years ago. Now it’s a need to have. Can you tell us more about the entire lifecycle and participating stakeholders?
Chris: I can. So it’s an interesting industry and the lifecycle starts with the raw materials that make up lithium-ion batteries. So we have to go all the way back actually to where those come from, predominantly mines. Things like nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper, and aluminum. All that goes into making lithium-ion batteries.
So really that’s where it starts and what those raw materials are eventually converted into is something called CAM or cathode active materials. There are a lot of steps that go in between, but effectively that’s what we’re driving towards is the active materials in a battery. Those cathode active materials are then combined with other things like graphite and aluminum and copper foils and plastics to form cells.
And I’m not a battery expert on the chemistries and batteries. I like to take them apart and recycle them. Forgive me if I’ve misstepped a little bit there, but ultimately what those cells go into are things like energy storage devices and phones, and electric vehicles. And so where Li-Cycle gets involved is actually on the back end.
When those cells reach the end of their life we’ll take them and we’ll process them through our technology. And ultimately arrive back at those raw materials, perhaps not in the same form as when they started, but things like nickel sulfate and cobalt sulfate, and lithium carbonate are really what we are after. And we’ll eventually sell from our Hub facility in Rochester, New York, and others. And so that’s where we fit in. That really is intended to close the loop. So right now there’s not a lot of recycled material in lithium-ion batteries that industry like Li-Cycle is growing. And so over time, you’ll see more recycled content of those raw materials in batteries. That’s really our goal.
The other point I’d like to make on the end of that is we don’t just take lithium-ion batteries, we also take in what they call manufacturing materials or things that are produced throughout the manufacturing of cells that perhaps don’t need quality requirements.
Some of the offcuts, for example, we’ll take those into our process. We recycle them because they also have value of metals like the nickel and the cobalt in the lithium. That gives you an idea of generally the lifecycle. It is quite a complex one. It’s a global industry. It, it’s quite exciting and we play a part both in the, I would say in anti-intermediate with those manufacturing materials, but also on the back end with end of life batteries themselves.
Jim: Wow. That’s quite a bit of different things that you’re recovering from. You know your processes unique to what a lot of other people are doing. What are its recovery rates? And I think you mentioned most of the materials that can be reclaimed, but are there any others in there as part of that process?
Chris: Yeah, so we, we aim to recover as much as we can. Of course, that’s the goal and the objective. We have a technology model called Spoke & Hub. I’ve mentioned it a few times and maybe I’ll talk a bit more about it. And I think there’s some more questions probably in the conversation coming.
But what our technology train really is our Spoke facilities are module- based or modular smaller facilities where we do pre-processing of battery and battery materials. And then our Hub is hydrometallurgical recovery, which means water-based chemistry for the recovery of metals effectively.
And When I look at recovery process it’s really across the board on our technology train or our full technology suite. And we’re driving towards 95% recovery of all the materials in a battery, although, things like the electrolyte solvent, for example, is not something that we actively recover.
Just based on our process. It goes into our Spoke facility into the solution. And we’ll get into exactly what we do in our Spoke, I’m sure in a little bit. But most of what we recover is the metal value. So the aluminum, the copper, nickel, manganese, cobalt, lithium. That’s really what we want, and we’re driving towards that 95% recovery rate for those.
Jim: Wow, that’s really getting a lot of that value back out of it. Nathan, let me turn to you with lithium-ion battery recycling so important in the global drive for greater sustainability. It’s great that we’re working with Li-Cycle on their process automation. Can you share Emerson’s sustainability framework and I guess specifically that “Greening By” part to help our customers achieve more sustainable operations?
Nathan: Yeah, I’d say, our framework is built around really three pillars. One, “Greening Of”. So we work really hard inside of Emerson to try to make ourselves more efficient every day using different types of programs around the globe to green ourselves to the scope one, two, and three.
The things we use directly with, assets we own that use energy and then our supply chain, etc. So that’s “Greening By”. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have “Greening With”, where we partner with universities or government bodies around the globe to steward new programs or research. To try to make the world more sustainable or come up with new ideas and new programs to drive more energy efficiency or all kinds of things.
But the pillar that, you mentioned, “Greening By”, that’s really where we can change probably the biggest chunk of energy reduction in optimizing and sustainability programs when we work with customers like Li-Cycle. There’s just a tremendous amount of work. Our software and devices and solutions do every single day, regardless of industry, regardless of the customer, to try to make those customers help those customers run their operations more efficiently. And those are really important programs. Every single time we help run a boiler a little more efficiently than it would otherwise. It’s saving energy.
Those things are being done every day around the globe with thousands and thousands of facilities. But then once in a while, we get to work with a company like Li-Cycle, which is truly revolutionizing a part of our society to try to make the world a better place by tackling a problem, like in this case, recycling lithium that we all know is going to be something for a number of decades we’re going to have to deal with as we have more and more electric cars and in other ways to power electrification of other devices around the globe. And that’s really both fortunate and powerful for us to be able to work with those companies because they really are trying to change the world.
And so it’s our software, our devices are intelligent products that help them run their facilities, but also as they go and build out their plants around the globe, the Spoken & Hub that he’ll talk about, we want to be there the whole time. So “Greening By”, with you’re working with our customers to green, their operations are really the place that we can make the biggest impact.
Jim: Yeah, and that’s so true. Anytime you get out on the roads, more and more electric vehicles, so that trend is just rolling and rolling there. So it’s great that we can work with companies like Li-Cycle who are tackling that challenge. Not just around the spent batteries but in the production process, the waste, and everything else. That’s great.
So Chris, what are some of the significant technical challenges in this brand new one-of-a-kind type of process that y’all have?
Chris: This is the, it is a good question because that’s what keeps me and my team really excited about the industry that we’re in and what we’re doing at Li-Cycle.
There are a lot of different technical challenges. Of course, when I look outside of the walls of the company, we have to keep abreast of the changing chemistries, for example, in cells. All the different new technologies that cell makers are coming out with in terms of the mix of different types of metals, some of the different anodes that are coming out, and just battery technologies in general because eventually those technologies will come to us and we have to be flexible in how we accept and recycle those materials. Internally, when I look at what we are doing, we’ve made some really interesting strides this year, I’d say. We have a number of Spoke facilities in North America. We have one in Kingston, Ontario, and one in Rochester, New York. And we just have rolled out two additional ones—one in Arizona and one in Alabama.
And the Spoke facilities for us in Arizona and Alabama are unique because they can process full packs. So that is essentially a pack from an electric vehicle. We can take and process all the way through to our intermediate products at our Spoke facility. And as far as I’m aware, it’s the first of the kind in the industry to be able to take a full pack and process that without dismantling, without discharging as well.
And we can get into some of the reasons why. That’s a unique technology for us, in general, a little later on. But we’ve got some really cool innovations going on. We’re starting to see those roll out into our asset mix of what we’re building at Li-Cycle. And that’s only on the Spoke side. When I look at things like our Hub technology, of course, there’s a lot of innovation that goes into that.
We use off-the-shelf equipment and control equipment as well. But what we do is we put it together in the right way, and we run it under the right conditions to make it unique for the feed material that we get. And so we have a very rich feedstock, I would say, of high-quality metals at high concentrations. And therefore, our process is designed to recover the nickel, the lithium, and the cobalt from that.
Quite interesting, lots of innovation going on inside and outside the company, and we’re really active in that, which is an exciting place to be as a chemical engineer.
Jim: Yeah, it sounds like there’s a lot of technical challenge in there, taking it through and some solve working with the complete pack instead of having to break it down into components and work with it. I guess besides the technical challenges, I imagine there are logistical challenges in this. Can you talk through some of these challenges and how you address them?
Chris: Sure. So we’ve structured our business so that we can address some of the logistical challenges. Let’s say with electric vehicles at their end of life. Batteries could come to us through a variety of different ways. And that could be from the OEMs directly, it could be from a dealership network, but ultimately, it’s really distributed as electric vehicles throughout in this case, the United States.
So the question that we have to answer is how do we best get the batteries safely to one of our locations, process them fairly quickly to what we call intermediate or more inert products, and then ship those to our Hub facilities or other assets that we have? And so again, going back and I keep talking about the Hub & Spoke model, but maybe we’ll dig in a little more.
And so our Spokes, we deploy to anywhere that has a demand for recycling or pre-processing of lithium-ion batteries. So, in that case, we can put them in areas of high demand, perhaps co-located with cell manufacturers or OEMs. And really, what that’s intended to do is take the battery pack, which is probably the highest risk for transportation, and move it to a pre-processing location quickly, and then process it through.
And we do that through our Spokes, and we do it in what’s called submerged shredding. So effectively, we take a battery pack, and we process it. We shred it or deconstruct it underwater effectively. And that has a number of benefits. Predominantly safety. And it allows us to take a pack and convert it into three products.
One, a shredded plastics product which is fairly low value, but it’s something that we recover, and we take very seriously to try and get that back into the economy. I would say a mid-value product, which is shredded copper and aluminum foil. So think of aluminum foil in your kitchen, only much thinner.
We get small pieces of that, and that is the current collector and a battery the positive and negative current collector. We catch that, and we produce that as a product. And then lastly, we get what’s called black mass. And that’s an industry term. It’s really the graphite and the oxide, the metal oxide materials in a battery, and it’s combined for us, and we filter that out of our solution.
And that becomes really the key intermediate product for us that we ship to our Hub. And that’s where we start to recover the metals in that black mass material. It’s an inert product, so everything we produce in our Spoke is inert and that allows us to safely ship it to the different assets that we have for post-processing.
So that’s how we handle logistics at a high level. Of course, really, it’s driven by shipping and safety. For us, that’s the two.
Jim: Yeah. That’s really interesting, and I have a follow-up question down the road a little bit on that, to take a battery, which is a highly charged thing, to be able to drive a motor to get you down the road or whatever else it’s doing into an inert product that’s safe to transport for further processing. That’s really interesting.
Nathan, I guess given the technical and logistical challenges that Chris highlighted, what are some of the industrial software and automation solutions that will play an essential role in this project in future projects to come?
Nathan: Yeah. I think as you mentioned, the Spokes, they collect all the material, the Spokes, they break it down and they’ll ship the main material, the black mass material to the Hubs.
And our control & automation system is what they’ve selected for their first refinery and Rochester, their Hub there in New York. And. It’s really become the central nervous system of their operations, at least for that facility. And we feel innovation is really important, and most of the innovation that we bring to market, we try to do it before customers like Li-Cycle know they need it or any of our customers know they need it. And it’s usually done through software. So as they’re building their facilities, Chris and his team will be looking at ways to innovate how they operate the facilities, whether it be simulation, digital twins, training their operators in time, or maybe even more and more autonomous operations.
And DeltaV has got that software built in. And so as they decide to, you leverage more and more of that control and automation capability at that one facility that will be something useful for them. And then, as they want to integrate their Spokes in the operations across the U.S., there are other Hubs they’ll be able to do that. And then ultimately, we hope to partner with them as a programmatic partner so that layer across that one refinery can be used and duplicated at other refineries that they may build across either United States or even globally.
Jim: Yeah, that sounds like that role of technology in there, not just making it operate safely and reliably and everything, but the data that you get from it to optimize what you’re doing and is more of these Hubs & Spokes get out there coordinating among them. Chris, I’ve heard you’ve mentioned urban mining or mining above ground. Can you tell us how that’s helping out the supply chain and the commodity shortages in some of these areas around batteries, around the world? And how is that affecting your business?
Chris: Sure. We do the term urban mining because what we’re getting is really a refined product at its end of its life in the form of a lithium-ion battery. We look at that as you have a cell phone, for example, or in your garage. I’m sure you have a battery-powered drill that you use around the house.
We take all of those materials and we’ll convert them back into their raw materials to get that back into the industry. And we have a way of doing that fairly quickly. We can be agile, of course. With our Spoke rollout, our Hubs are a little less agile, given the size of the investments. But we also think that because these are refined products, our feedstock material is quite high value, quite high in concentration of metals, and therefore what that allows us to do is capture the value and push it back into the supply chain, hopefully, a little bit quicker than it takes to permit and get moving on a primary mine, for example, for lithium or for nickel. Now I think over time recycled content of these metals will continue to increase in batteries, but we’ll play a role alongside other commodity producers or other nickel. For example, in lithium producers we can’t do it on our own.
And they definitely need to start incorporating recycled material into cells. So we work well together. We have to. That’s the goal of making sure that we alleviate the supply chain and commodity issues that you’re speaking about. We have to play a part in recycling. I think it’s the right thing to do when you look at the amount of global resources that’s put into making a battery in terms of the raw material supply and all the different smarts of people and different companies that come together to produce a sell and ultimately an electric vehicle that you can drive on the road.
We owe it to ourselves to use the materials wisely as they are finite. And they do take a lot of effort to, in most cases, dig out of the ground first in order to get them into the battery. So I like to look at it as the right thing to do from an environmental perspective. And it just so happens that there’s a very solid business case behind that as well for us.
Jim: Yeah, and it seems like as that growth continues to happen over time, that recycle seems like it would play a larger and larger role in that whole process. So that really will be a significant and even more significant piece as we move forward. Nathan, I understand that. , the initial projects are on a fast track. What are some of the project methodologies, technologies, and I guess, team makeup used to help execute the project to meet the timeline?
Nathan: Jim, a company like Li-Cycle, they’re investing heavily to try to bring this technology to market as quickly as they possibly can, and they need to have a partner that will help them execute these projects in a timely fashion.
They are aggressive schedules. And good solid project management, project execution has got to be done with intent. And we take it very seriously. We’ve built our capabilities over the years. We weren’t very good out of it, 20, 25 years ago, but we’ve become very good at it.
And to me it really takes a Venn diagram of people. You’ve gotta have really good people that have domain expertise, in this case a blend between mining and chemical processes. You’ve got to have procedures and documentation tools. Things that you can do over and over you. You can’t just rely on just the best people.
You’ve gotta have a team of people that follow the same processes globally or regionally, and then technology. So it’s a blend between people, technology and process that really to have an execute a project really well. Particularly a fast-track project like these. And we have 6,000 people around the globe we can bring to bear to programs like this.
And we really do take it very seriously and have done a lot of it around the globe, and we’re very excited to work with Chris and his team on this project. But there are some things that we feel like we do really well, that our technology based smart commission is a great example.
So as you’re building a plant like they are, you will invariably find out that you wish you could have measured something you didn’t think to measure when you’ve put the design. If only we had this temperature, if only we had this pressure. And while it may sound like a simple thing, we’ll just order another device, and you put it in, and you measure it.
The configuration of that device that wasn’t preconfigured, wasn’t set up, can put, a big gap in the schedule. And we have the capability to have that device shipped from the factory readily preconfigured, so to speak. Show up, wired up and it automatically uploads into the automation system without any intervention from people.
So those types of technologies. Another one that we use a lot we call it electronic marshalling, but basically it’s a technology that allows if a module to show up at site and maybe that had been specified with three types of measurements. And instead of those three types of measurements, they came in with different types of measurements.
And so, typically you would have to change the I/O cards, and you would have to change the configuration. Our technology allows you to basically just change those three signals very quickly and, through software, essentially change those I/O types on the fly, again, without having to do any paperwork or documentation or any of that because it’s all done automatically.
So while those things understand, each one of those individually may not take maybe a day or two. If you’re in the middle of trying to start the plan up, those two days could be a huge deal. And more importantly, sometimes they can have waterfall effects that could change by weeks. So they’re really important.
And so we do think between that blend of technology having the right processes and a lot of really good domain expertise in our people. We can help companies like Li-Cycle even in the fastest, most critical timelines.
Jim: Yeah. I know you get towards the end of the project, those changes come in, and it’s nice to have technology be able to adapt to it without setting the project back, delayed a week or weeks, or whatever else in there.
So that’s a real good advancement because I don’t know any project. The way you draw it up is the way it is installed and ready to go. All right, Chris, I know we spoke a lot on the Spoke side of it and that initial breakdown of the battery into the components that could go over to the Hub, and it makes sense in that model. Those are highly decentralized, spread out, and doing their thing. Can you talk a little bit more about the Hub side and what goes on with, what they receive in from the Spokes to get to where the finished recycled product that you’re looking for?
Chris: I am just forewarning. This is the exciting part for me. You might have to reign me back in if I get too deep. But the Hub process I think, is really neat. It’s again, hydrometallurgical, so water-based recovery of metals in our case. There’s of course reagents that go into it, and we’ll speak a bit about that. But the key points for us is that it’s water-based chemistry.
It’s low temperature. I think the highest temperature we run is somewhere around 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit. So less than boiling, quite low temperature. It’s a patented process. I forgot to mention that with our Spokes as well. So we have a patent around our Spoke and our Hub as a core technology for Li-Cycle.
So we’ve done a lot of work on this one. Spent about a year in piloting, if not a bit more, before we rolled into the full commercial design. That’s the lead-up to what we’ve done on the Hub. The Hub itself is roughly 10 different areas all combined into a hydrometallurgical plant. So they all play together and they all have a function, but effectively it starts with us taking the black mass material from our Spokes and we slurry it up, we make it a slurry, and then we leech all the metals with acid.
The intent there is to really dissolve all the metals, and once you have them dissolved, the game is really to systematically pull them back out again, out of solution, into the product form that you want. That’s the high level. It’s not nearly as easy as that, but we have a number of unit operations that we work through.
So the first couple are looking at recovering things like copper and aluminum and iron. The middle section of our plant is what’s called solvent extraction, and that’s where we do a lot of the heavy lifting to recover manganese and cobalt and nickel. And then the back end of our facility is really focused on lithium carbonate recovery.
So a lot of those unit operations are independent but then all linked together. And that’s where controls become really important because you have all these different systems that are working and really producing different types of materials or products for us. And they all have different operating conditions, be it pH or temperature or the addition of reagents like acids or bases.
Really a neat process. As I said, we spend a lot of time developing it ourselves, getting the operating conditions right, and then turning that into a full-scale commercial design, which is what we’re working on now. Our first Hub is going to be in the greater Rochester area in New York, New York State.
It’s an old piece of land that was owned by the Eastman Kodak Company. So a lot of really good infrastructure there that’s supporting the plant or that will support the plant. For Li-Cycle, it’s $485 million investment. So quite significant for us in our first step into the hydrometallurgy recovery of metals.
Jim: That sounds like a fascinating process as it’s going through, and you’re stripping off the different metals out of it and bringing them together—that’s really cool. Nathan, I guess given Li-Cycle’s plan for additional Hubs & Spokes across the globe, can you describe the role of what we do as far as standards and treating the project as a program instead of a single project?
Nathan: Sure. When we get to work with a customer like Li-Cycle that selects us as their partner for a project like this but also has expansion plans, it’s really great for us. It’s great for them. You can think of a program as almost a series of projects.
So Chris talked about their first Hub that they’re going to, they’re going to put in place there in, in New York. We’ll learn a ton together through that project. No matter how well we plan it, no matter how well we work together up front and we work through these projects, we will find things that we learn together. But all of those things can be captured and will be captured.
A program is a series of projects where it takes long-term dedication and, frankly, partnership. We love them because it allows us to co-invest or not co-invest with our customers, right? We’ll put a dedicated team in place that will over time, continue to work with Li-Cycle as they build Hubs & Spokes and Hubs regardless of where they are, whether they’re in the United States or beyond. That team can stay intact.
We have technologies that allow that remote team to be. Almost as if they’re in the same location. And then we’ll start to build out libraries and templates and things that they can reuse from plant to plant. And frankly, our own domain knowledge around Li-Cycle’s process.
Because while we may have a tremendous amount of chemical processing, refining capability, or mining expertise and understand them, the raw sort of high-level chemistry or mining dynamics. Their process, as he just said, is patented. That means no one’s done it before. And so there will be things we’ll learn through this first development of this first Hub that will codify, and protect for them.
It will be theirs and ours together to be able to reuse. And we really do appreciate not just this opportunity but the long-term opportunity with them around the globe. And then, finally, after each project gets finished, you’ve gotta support it. One of the things that’s very important to customers like Li-Cycle they told us as they were talking to us about this program, is they want to make sure that they have the support they need at those facilities to keep the plants running.
And we have a dedicated group of offices around the globe or impact partners in North America or sales offices around the globe to help them keep those plants running, which is very important because if you’re going to spend a half a billion dollars on a facility, you need it to run all the time for many years.
And so all three of those things are important. Keeping those projects going and making sure we learn what we do through the projects and then supporting them afterward.
Jim: Yeah, you take the learnings from the first and then apply what you can and just keep rolling through as you’re growing this over time. Chris, I probably should have asked it earlier. Lithium-ion batteries are in everything from our cell phones, PCs, watches, automobiles, and everything else. Does this process work with all the different types of lithium-ion batteries that are out there?
Chris: It does. So I consider our Spoke facilities, what we call chemistry and form factor agnostic.
So effectively what that means is you could pretty much put whatever you want in there that’s a lithium battery within reason. And the Spoke won’t really matter. It’ll produce its three key products out of that, the black mass, the foils, and the plastics. Very flexible on the front end.
When we look at the Hub, it’s a little bit different. So the Hub of as a hydrometallurgical facility has to be designed to work within a limit of chemistry, let’s say. So our first Hub in New York state is predominantly designed for nickel, cobalt, and manganese chemistries. The alternative that you’re seeing in the industry now is LFP if you’ve heard of that, lithium-iron-phosphate chemistries.
Those are starting to; I would say, become more prevalent. And so we have a process ourselves that we’ve developed to actually recover lithium from lithium iron phosphate derived black mass. So we can take some of that in, into our Hub in New York state, but we also have a dedicated process. Then as that chemistry becomes more prevalent, we’ll start to look to roll that out as well.
Again, be agile and look at what’s coming from a chemistry point of view outside of our company, of course. And then how do we manage internally? Very long-winded way of saying we have flexibility in both the front and the back end of our technologies, but certainly, the Spokes are very agnostic when it comes to what types of batteries you can feed them.
Jim: Yeah, and it sounds like you have to be on your toes for what’s getting developed, coming out that may put the others away. So that keeps it exciting. Never a dull moment, I imagine. Let’s start winding things down. Nathan, do you have any closing thoughts on our work with the Li-Cycle team?
Nathan: I guess I’d just say it’s really both a pleasure and something super exciting for us to be able to work with a company Li-Cycle. When I talk to my own kids about things they’re doing, I can explain it to them, and they can get it.
They understand how recycling the batteries that they see being used in their computers, or certainly, their cars that they may drive someday, is really important. And it means a lot to us and our employees to be able to work with a company life Li-Cycle. So we want to make sure they’re successful. They need to be successful.
The world needs companies like Li-Cycle to be successful, and it’s really something special to be able to work with them. I tell our employees, I tell myself every day, you may not know our products change the world. Our products and solutions help our customers change the world, and that means an awful lot to us.
So we’re very grateful and honored and humbled to help ’em, and certainly, we’ll do everything we can to do.
Jim: Yeah, I think you’re a company that we can brag to people we meet that ask, what does Emerson do? In ways that we help our customers, and the things they do that are changing the world.
So Chris, how do you envision everything unfolding over the next several years?
Chris: Wow. Li-Cycle is extremely active, I would say. And we’re pretty excited about the industry that we’re in. So if I look at our portfolio, We’re very quickly moving into Europe. So that’s our focus right now. We’ve announced, of course, a Spoke in Germany as well as in Norway, and we’re actively moving on those two.
You’ll see I think more from us as we continue to grow our Spoke network as well around the world. Our first Hub, of course, we talked about in Rochester, New York. That is a key component for us as we go forward over the next year to two years. Be focused on that, and that’s a big milestone for our company.
So I guess all I can say is really excited to to see where Li-Cycle goes and to be a part of it. To bring new technologies into the industry is just it’s great, and to have a great partner in Emerson is also adding to that. So I appreciate your kind words, Nathan.
Jim: We’re really excited to be part of that journey too. I want to thank you both so much for sharing your insights with our listeners, and we look forward to seeing how this future unfolds. And I guess for our listeners who wish to learn more, visit li-cycle.com for everything they’re doing. Chris and Nathan, thank you so much for joining the podcast today!
-end of transcript-
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Emerson’s Vladimir Nitu joins me to discuss how remote services can help drive business performance improvements in many areas—sustainability, reliability, safety, and production.
In this podcast, Emerson's Aaron Crews joins me to discuss the innovative DeltaV IO.CONNECT which simplifies the process of modernizing control & automation systems from many different suppliers.
Brandon Bromberek and Marc Buttler join Colorado Hydrogen Network host Brian DeBruine to discuss the measurements in moving and dispensing hydrogen through the supply chain.
As a part of our Asia-Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization podcast series, Emerson's Sanjay Thakker joins Jim Cahill to discuss the trends, challenges, and solutions in the Biofuels & Biomaterials sector to achieve circular economy goals.
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Emerson’s Robert Surwilo discusses how Zedi SaaS SCADA projects are implemented from project kickoff through post-project support to enable digital transformation initiatives.
En este episodio, nuestro especialista en Instrumentación, Moisés Campos nos explica las consideraciones esenciales en cuanto a instrumentación se refiere para la industria de pulpa y papel. Hablaremos de las mejores prácticas, tendencias y cómo Emerson puede ayudar a optimizar las diferentes etapas del proceso y apoyar a alcanzar las metas de eficiencia energética y con esto impactar los costos operativos, mantener la competitividad en los mercados y alcanzar los objetivos de sostenibilidad.
Suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
In the podcast, Hydrogen measurement and flow with Emerson, Emerson’s Don Fregelette, Laura Chemler, and Andrew Srgo join host Brian DeBruine to discuss some of the challenges and solutions in handling hydrogen across its supply chain from production through distribution.
At the upcoming October 24-28 Emerson Exchange conference, Emerson’s Karl White will be joined by a gas producer in the Western United States to share their success story on applying Rosemount measurement technology to improve their capital project and ongoing operational costs. Jim Cahill caught up with Karl to get a preview of what they’ll discuss in this podcast.
Emerson’s Shubhi Goel and Andy Wang join Jim Cahill in this Asia Pacific Sustainability and Decarbonization podcast to discuss the trends, challenges, and solutions to more effectively manage and control wind farms with integrated monitoring, supervisory control, and asset management.
En este episodio el experto José Everardo Molina profundiza sobre la tecnología TopWorx de monitoreo y detección de posición de válvulas de proceso en aplicaciones industriales que permite una mayor rentabilidad y reducir los tiempos de inactividad de las aplicaciones críticas. Hablamos sobre la importancia, beneficios y riesgos en el monitoreo de válvulas, así como las diferentes líneas de productos que ofrece TopWorx de Emerson para garantizar la seguridad, rentabilidad y optimización en los procesos.
Suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
In this podcast, Emerson Chief Sustainability Officer Mike Train joins Jim Cahill to discuss Emerson’s “Greening Of, Greening By and Greening With” sustainability framework and the recently released 2021 ESG Report with firmly established net zero targets.
In this episode in our continuing Asia-Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization podcast series, Emerson’s Ryo Hashimoto joined me to discuss the electrification trend and battery developments as an energy storage solution.
Alineado a las prioridades de reducir el impacto ambiental que tienen las industrias y los países, hablaremos de una solución desarrollada para monitorear a los equipos que usan como fuente de energía u operación el aire comprimido.
Conozcamos Aventics, cuyo innovador portafolio de productos ofrece sensores inteligentes con beneficios tanto operativos como en términos de sostenibilidad.
Conozcamos más sobre MyEmerson, una plataforma digital que ofrece una experiencia personalizada, integral y gratuita en diferentes etapas como son especificación, selección y adquisición de equipos Emerson. En este episodio hablaremos sobre My Workspace.
Te invitamos a dar de alta un usuario y comenzar a explorar los recursos que MyEmerson ofrece.
Emerson’s Director of Cybersecurity, Mike Lester, discusses with podcast host Jim Cahill many of the issues and growing threats companies face, as they try to maintain strong cybersecurity postures.
One of the important methods in decarbonization is carbon capture, storage and utilization (CCUS). It’s a way to capture the byproduct of combustion or other processes and avoid releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
In our continuing Asia Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization podcast series, Emerson’s Willie Tan and Amy Loi join me to discuss the trends, opportunities, and solutions available to continue to grow the role of CCUS in the region.
Visit the Sustainability & Decarbonization section on Emerson.com or connect with a local expert in your country in the Asia-Pacific region. Transcript Jim: Hi everyone! This is Jim Cahill with another Emerson Automation Experts podcast in our continuing Asia-Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization podcast series. Today we’re going to explore carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies with Emerson’s Willie Tan and Amy Loi. We’ll look at some technologies to optimize the carbon capture process. Welcome, Willie and Amy!
Willie & Amy: Thanks, Jim
Jim: It’s great to have you both! Willie let’s start with you. Can you share a bit about your current role and some background on your experience with our listeners?
Willie: I’m Willie Tan. I’m based in Singapore. I joined Emerson in 2012. I have been working under the Flow Controls business division and supporting Fisher control valve products. I specialize in hydrocarbon industries covering the O&G, LNG, Refinery, and Petrochemical industries. I’m involved in business development and technical support for sustainability and renewable energies, which are actively happening in hydrocarbon industries. Some examples include renewable diesel, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), hydrogen, and Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) which is our topic today.
Jim: That’s great… thanks. Amy, can you tell us about yourself?
Amy: My name is Amy Loi. I am the Sales & Marketing Director for Analytical Products. I have been with Emerson for 20 years in various technical, sales, business development, and marketing roles. With the recent focus in Sustainability & Decarbonization, I have been tasked to lead the Brownfield Sustainability, which covers Emission Control, Energy Efficiency, and Carbon Capture for Asia Pacific, and participation in other sustainability and renewable energies segments such as Hydrogen, biofuels, and batteries. Our primary focus within Brownfield sustainability is to create awareness of Emerson’s solution and partner with our customers towards their decarbonization journey.
Jim: Thank you, Amy. So let’s dive into Carbon Capture, Utilization & Storage. Since that’s a mouthful to say, we’ll shorten it to CCUS during this podcast. Willie, can you define and describe CCUS for us?
Willie: CCUS is a process to capture carbon dioxide before it is released into the atmosphere. The CCUS can capture up to 90% of carbon dioxide emissions released from burning fossil fuels during electricity generation and industrial processes such as steel or cement production. Once the carbon dioxide is captured, it can be compressed into a liquid state or left as gas before being transported by pipeline or ship to a storage site. The carbon dioxide can be stored permanently deep underground. Alternatively, carbon dioxide can be utilized for other industrial purposes instead of storage. For example, carbon dioxide can be used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) by injecting it into the oil and gas reservoirs. Carbon dioxide can be used in chemical industries by feeding it to algae that are then harvested and processed into biofuel. Carbon Dioxide can also be used as a chemical feedstock in Petrochemical or Chemical processes.
Jim: That’s great. Amy, what’s CCUS’s role in net-zero emission, and how does it help with carbon dioxide reduction on a large scale?
Amy: Time is running out to achieve the zero-emission target by 2050. CCUS could be a game-changer. The CCUS can be added to various industrial facilities iden...
Emerson's Martin Van Der Merwe joins podcast host Jim Cahill in part 2 to discuss the trends, challenges, and solutions in growing hydrogen's role in the Asia-Pacific region's energy mix.
Martin Van Der Merwe joins Jim Cahill as part of our Asia-Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization podcast series to discuss the trends, challenges, and solutions for hydrogen as an energy carrier in the region.
Conoce MyEmerson, una robusta plataforma digital personalizada y gratuita, que ofrece una amplia gama de herramientas que permiten diseñar rápidamente soluciones, administrar software y activos instalados, colaborar con expertos y optimizar los procesos de adquisición para lograr una mejora medible en velocidad y productividad.
Te invitamos a dar de alta un usuario y comenzar a explorar los recursos que MyEmerson ofrece.
Tres de nuestros especialistas internacionales nos comparten su visión sobre soluciones de geolocalizacion y gestión de personal en el campo. Hablaremos de los beneficios y las consideraciones para su implementación.
Emerson’s Tanner Erickson joins podcast host Jim Cahill to discuss the transition for SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems and the advantages and disadvantages in comparing on-premise and cloud-based SCADA systems.
Companies across the globe are placing a much greater focus on sustainability and decarbonization in their manufacturing and production processes. This is true across the Asia-Pacific region.
In this initial podcast in our Asia-Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization (S&D) series, I'm joined by ARC Advisory Group's General Manager for Southeast Asia, Bob Gill and Emerson's Director of Strategic Planning, Sustainability & Decarbonization for Asia Pacific, Pravin Raj to discuss the trends, practices, and technologies that companies are following to drive their strategies.
In this episode, we explore Emerson's Sustainability Framework, key factors driving S&D initiatives, types of transformations, emissions management strategies, early successes, lithium battery & hydrogen production trends, and some of the technologies to enable these initiatives.
Visit the Sustainability & Decarbonization section on Emerson.com and connect with Emerson's Asia-Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization experts in your country.
Transcript Jim: Hi everyone. This is Jim Cahill with another "Emerson Automation Experts" podcast. Globally, we are seeing an increasing emphasis on sustainability & decarbonization as countries, corporations and communities further define and implement their roadmaps to achieve net zero / carbon neutrality and operate in a more sustainable way. At the moment, this is nowhere more apparent than in Asia Pacific. Based on a Bloomberg NEF report, out of the $755B the world invested in low-carbon technologies (e.g. renewable energy, electrified transport, hydrogen, carbon capture, sustainable materials, etc) in 2021, 42% of that was invested in China, Japan, India and Korea alone, with China increasing its investment by 60% compared to the prior year.
We are launching an Asia Pacific Sustainability & Decarbonization Podcast Series to take a closer look at trends in the region and to discuss with experts on the technologies and applications that are key to enabling companies to achieve their decarbonization goals. Today, in the very first of this series of podcasts, I'm joined by Pravin Raj, Director of Strategic Planning, Sustainability & Decarbonization from Emerson Automation Solutions Asia Pacific and Bob Gill, General Manager for Southeast Asia for the ARC Advisory Group, to discuss the sustainability and decarbonization trends we are seeing in the Asia Pacific region and how Emerson is supporting our customers in this space.
Welcome Pravin and Bob!
Pravin: Hi Jim and Bob. Excited to be here.
Bob: Hi Jim and Pravin. Glad to be part of this discussion.
Jim: Pravin, it's great to have you here with us. Let's begin by asking you to share your background and path to your current role with our listeners.
Pravin: Thanks Jim. I am based in Singapore, and I manage both Strategic Planning and Sustainability & Decarbonization for Emerson Automation Solutions Asia Pacific. Prior to joining Emerson in Singapore, I was based in the United Kingdom and Azerbaijan, where I worked as an Offshore Installation Engineer and later as a Project Manager, responsible for leading the engineering, design, procurement, construction and commissioning of offshore oil & gas platforms.
Empowering a more environmentally responsible planet is ingrained in Emerson's purpose. I am inspired and passionate about how we help customers across some of the world's most essential industries make measurable sustainability progress, and am grateful that I can contribute towards that in my current role.
Jim: Thanks Pravin …And Bob, could you also give us a brief intro about yourself?
Bob: Yes, sure. I manage ARC Advisory Group's business operations and market research activities in Southeast Asia. ARC provides technology research, advisory and consulting services to industrial automation and software suppliers as well as to end-user companies in the manufacturing, infrastructure and energy sectors. And certainly, at ARC,
In this podcast, Alessea Lane & Michael Tworzydlo discuss the most recent release of the Plantweb Optics platform and Plantweb Optics Analytics software applications.
Actualmente en México todos los contribuyentes que se dedican a la industria de hidrocarburos o petrolíferos deben cumplir con nuevas obligaciones fiscales de controles volumétricos.
En este episodio conversamos con nuestra ingeniera Esther Solano, especialista en soluciones basadas en software sobre qué significa el control volumétrico, qué implica esta regulación y qué consideraciones se deben de tener para estar en cumplimiento con este requerimiento del SAT.
Muchas de las marcas y productos de Emerson que han sido reconocidos globalmente por su tecnología y calidad, se manufacturan en México y Latinoamérica. Conozcamos en voz del experto, René Cabrera, Director de operaciones de la región, la relevancia que tiene México en la manufactura global de Emerson, así como las mejores prácticas en términos de transformación digital, responsabilidad social, desarrollo de talento y la visión de sostenibilidad que se tiene en las plantas que producen equipos de Emerson.
Te invitamos a escuchar el episodio completo y suscríbirte a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio35_Hecho-en-Mexico-Manufactura-de-equipo-Emerson_mixdown.mp3
Andy Coxall joins podcast host Jim Cahill to discuss the challenges in tailings management, the problems with valves not suited for this severe-service application, and why severe-service knife gate valve technology such as the Clarkson KS1 is the best choice for these challenging slurry applications.
Emerson’s Knut Riegel joins podcast host Jim Cahill in this Emerson Automation Experts podcast to discuss motor operated valves and the information that can be extracted to improve performance.
In this Storage Terminal Reliability podcast, Emerson Expert Carlos Matos, highlights the true cost of not being proactive (thousands of dollars per day) on shutdowns and repairs and provides how there are now innovative technologies like Plantweb Insight that can help you utilize the latest Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies to monitor your equipment and provide maintenance for your unique process.
In this special Emerson Automation Experts podcast, BayoTech’s General Council and Head of Policy, Andrew Leedom joins Jim Cahill. They discuss BayoTech technology innovations in modular, smaller scale & localized hydrogen production, the reduction in carbon intensity, and policies here in the U.S. at the federal and state levels to continue to foster hydrogen’s increasing role as an energy carrier.
Nuestro experto Sergio Díaz, nos habla de la filosofía de comisionamiento inteligente, un proceso basado en la tecnología que optimiza todo el proceso de comisionamiento y mejora la adaptabilidad del proyecto. Sergio nos cuenta sobre lo que necesita una organización para adoptar esta metodología y los beneficios alcanzables, observados en casos de aplicación.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a automatización industrial? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio34_Evolucionando-hacia-el-comisionamiento-inteligente.mp3
En este episodio el experto en Sistemas de Control y Sistemas Instrumentados de Seguridad, Sergio Díaz, nos comenta sobre las consideraciones más importantes en términos de ciberseguridad en los sistemas de las plantas.
Hablamos sobre arquitecturas recomendables, tendencias actuales y mejores prácticas para proteger los sistemas de control y sistemas instrumentados de seguridad de ataques cibernéticos.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/EPISOD_2.mp3
Jessica Prieto, directora ejecutiva de Eurotech Automation, una empresa italiana que utiliza MyEmerson para seleccionar y comprar dispositivos de campo, quien nos comparte su experiencia sobre las ventajas que ofrece la plataforma.
With the hydrogen demand growing globally, some challenges are arising across the supply chain to move it from production to consumption. One opportunity is blending a percentage hydrogen into the existing pipeline infrastructure. Rossella Mimmi and Attilio Lepore address the challenges of blending hydrogen into the existing pipelines such as leakage and embrittlement.
En este episodio los expertos en tecnologías de medición e instrumentación industrial, Jorge Espinoza y Carlos Cordeiro nos comentan sobre la importancia de una adecuada medición de flujo y densidad en minería, cuáles son los desafíos y retos más frecuentes para la industria en términos de estas mediciones, qué aplicaciones o procesos se consideran más viables de optimizar, así como un repaso de las variables más importantes en medición de flujo y densidad y cómo comenzar un proceso de integración de estas variables hacia una ruta de transformación digital.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio-32_Tecnologias-de-Medicion-de-Flujo-en-Mineria.mp3
Aurélien Tissot joins podcast host Jim Cahill in this Emerson Automation Experts podcast to discuss the topic of emissions and the technology opportunities for manufacturers and producers.
In this European Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Livio Salerno joins podcast host Maurizio De Francesco to describe the capabilities and ways MyEmerson helps drive improved performance.
David Leavitt joins podcast host Jim Cahill to discuss how triple-offset isolation valves improve storage terminal reliability while reducing overall lifecycle costs compared with other isolation valve technologies.
En este episodio, nos acompaña Fernando Castillo, especialista en Sistemas SCADA para hablarnos acerca de las tendencias del mercado actual en sistemas SCADA. Conversamos también sobre las consideraciones relacionadas a la virtualización de los sistemas SCADA en la nube.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio31_Hablemos-de-los-mitos-y-realidades-de-SCADA-en-la-nube.mp3
In this Storage Terminal Reliability podcast, Emerson's Dag Joraholmen joins podcast host Jim Cahill to discuss how corrosion monitoring can reduce the need for reactive maintenance and increase the overall reliability of storage terminal operations across the production lifecycle.
In a series of storage terminal reliability podcasts, Emerson experts will share ways that safety, environmental and operational risks can be mitigated. Emerson’s Manuel Arroyo, Director, Oil & Gas Industry Programs kicks off this podcast series by highlighting some of the risks & challenges and previews some of the technologies that can help these terminals improve reliability, safety, environmental compliance and terminal operations.
Llegamos al episodio 30 de nuestro podcast. En este episodio especial, conversamos con el experto en Servicios del Ciclo de Vida - Carlos Huertas sobre las innovaciones en optimización del ciclo de vida de las plantas y los servicios que Emerson ofrece en el mantenimiento de Sistemas de Control, específicamente DeltaV.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio30_Innovacion-en-el-mantenimiento-preventiv.mp3
Podcast host Jim Cahill is joined by Emerson’s Michael Tworzydlo to discuss the role of operational analytics to ensure operational health and optimize plant-wide performance by detecting abnormal behavior of processes and assets, identify root causes of problems, and predict future performance.
En este episodio conversamos con el experto José Luis Munive, sobre las soluciones tecnológicas avanzadas de Performance Services que ofrece Emerson a las industrias, orientadas a optimizar el Desempeño de una planta en operación, así como lo que implica el concepto de Gemelos Digitales y sus aplicaciones.
Hablamos acerca de los amplios beneficios que una simulación de procesos trae a las compañías en todo su ciclo de vida y el camino o pasos para una implementación adecuada y exitosa de los Gemelos Digitales.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a automatización industrial? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio29_Conozcamos-sobre-Gemelos-Digitales-y-sus-aplicaciones-.mp3
Emerson’s Nicolas Marti joins Jim Cahill in this Emerson Automation Experts podcast to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities in the fuel cell manufacturing process.
En este episodio, conversamos con el experto en sistemas de monitoreo e instrumentación, René González, sobre las nuevas tecnologías que existen para el monitoreo de tanques en la industria. Abordaremos cómo la automatización a través del monitoreo 4.0 permite a las industrias obtener información, mediciones y datos precisos, remotos y en tiempo real de sus tanques, mejorando no solo la seguridad sino también la confiabilidad, continuidad de la producción y optimización del almacenamiento.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a automatización industrial? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio28_El-camino-al-Monitoreo-de-Tanques-Industria-40.mp3
¿Buscas potenciar el desarrollo de tu capital humano? En este episodio nuestra Líder para Servicios Educativos de Emerson en Latinoamérica, Cinthia Solís, nos detalla acerca de la importancia de la capacitación técnica del personal como un factor de éxito en las empresas. Abordamos las mejores prácticas, ventajas y beneficios que la capacitación representa en elementos clave como: obtener el máximo provecho de las tecnologías y minimizar riesgos al personal, a las instalaciones y el ambiente.
Entérate además de la nueva experiencia de capacitación exclusiva: Virtual Training E-xperience y cómo participar.
En este episodio el experto en confiabilidad René Berumen nos explica a detalle la historia y la tecnología detrás de los configuradores de campo; sus específicaciones, funcionalidad y consideraciones para obtener el máximo provecho, así como una promoción especial disponible al intercambiar configuradores de campo de modelos anteriores por el novedoso configurador de campo portátil AMS Trex de Emerson.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a automatización industrial? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio-26_Innovacion-en-configuradores-de-campo_mixdown-1.mp3
¡Las válvulas de aislamiento juegan un papel crítico en aplicaciones de seguridad en las industrias!. Conozcamos con nuestros especialistas, Ricardo Jarero y Luis Miguel de la Cruz, la tecnología detrás de este tipo de válvulas y sus principios operativos.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a automatización industrial? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio25_Conozcamos-mas-sobre-valvulas-de-aislamiento.mp3
In this Emerson Automation Experts podcast, Denka Wangdi shares some of the challenges in the buildout of hydrogen mobility infrastructure and some of the ways advancing technologies and solutions are addressing these challenges.
Ana González, Doctora en ingeniería medioambiental y Directora global de sostenibilidad para Emerson, comparte la visión y el compromiso que tiene la compañía con las políticas ESG (medio ambiente, sociedad y gobierno corporativo). A la par, Jorge González, experto en soluciones y tecnologías de medición nos habla de las tendencias que se adoptan en la industria en la región latinoamericana hacia el desarrollo sostenible.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a automatización industrial? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio24_Emerson_el-compromiso-con-un-mundo-mas-sustentable_mixdown.mp3
Nuestro especialista en Soluciones de automatización para generación de energía, Héctor Bucio, nos detalla ampliamente sobre la tecnología de automatización de nueva generación para Ciclos combinados, el impacto que la automatización tiene en estos procesos y la variedad de soluciones Emerson para ciclos combinados.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a tecnologías de automatización? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio22_Ciclos-combinados.mp3
Alessea Lane discusses how operational technology can be made highly accessible by breaking down the silos in which they live and turning data into actionable information that’s available to the right people at the right time to drive transformational performance.
Queremos compartirles el portafolio de eventos virtuales que Emerson ha diseñado para adaptarse a la nueva realidad en apoyo a nuestros clientes.
En este episodio detallamos ampliamente nuestro portafolio de eventos virtuales, webinars, sesiones de pregunte al experto y training e-xperience.
Conoce nuestro calendario de este mes de agosto y registrate a las sesiones de tu interés en el siguiente link: https://go.emersonautomation.com/eventos-virtuales-agosto
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio21_Conoce-el-portafolio-de-eventos-virtuales-gratuitos-de-Emerson.mp3
Nuestro especialista Danny Gonzáles nos habla de una solución ya probada en Perú para el monitoreo de barcazas en presas de relave. Buscando mayor seguridad para el personal, disponibilidad de datos en tiempo real, fácil implementación y ahorros considerables en el proceso; el equipo de Emerson diseñó esta solución para apoyar a las compañías mineras a través de esta práctica e innovadora integración que exploraremos en este podcast.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio20_Mineria_Solucion-inalambrica-para-monitoreo-de-barcazas.mp3
In this very first episode of the EVALUE8 Podcast Series, we interview Karthik Dayalan, an expert and the Parts Business Development Manager in Emerson. Having met several customers, we discuss and explain the risk of using non-OEM parts and the benefits of using OEM Parts to operate your plant safely.
En este episodio Adolfo Santos, especialista instrumentación y aplicaciones de refrigeración industrial, nos orienta sobre cómo obtener el máximo provecho de los recursos a través de compresores monotornillo industriales, logrando altas eficiencias en los procesos y amigables con el ambiente.
Abordaremos conceptos básicos como qué es un compresor y para qué se utiliza. Aplicaciones recomendadas para la implementación de compresores monotornillo, detalles sobre el mecanismo de operación y beneficios que trae el uso de estas tecnologías en las diferentes operaciones industriales.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a tecnologías de automatización? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio19_Compresores-de-monotornillo-industriales_mixdown.mp3
En el entorno actual, donde las industrias buscan optimizar sus procesos y su consumo energético, las innovaciones en tecnologías neumática están alineadas a esta visión, integrándose a la estrategia de optimización de recursos. Ernesto Quinto, Especialista en Tecnologías Neumáticas, nos comparte estas innovaciones.
¿Te interesan los temas relacionados a tecnologías de automatización? No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio18_Tecnologias-Neumaticas-y-su-papel-en-la-transformacion-digital.mp3
Emerson's chief sustainability officer, Mike Train joined ARC Advisory Group's Bob Gill in a discussion about Emerson's greening of, greening by and greening with Emerson sustainability framework.
En este episodio los expertos Felipe Cabrera y Cristián Doerr nos comentan sobre los principales retos que enfrenta la minería hoy día. Abordarán tendencias recientes como transformación digital, centros de operaciones remotos y minería autónoma, además de las innovaciones tecnológicas que permiten mejoras operativas, al tiempo que se reducen riesgos ambientales y al personal.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio17_Innovacion-en-tecnologias-de-automatizacion-para-la-industria-minera.mp3
When the plant is not running the way it should, with excessive variability, alarm conditions or sub-optimized performance, plant engineers often connect with the Emerson Production Performance consultants. I had the opportunity to sit down and record a podcast with Emerson’s James Beall who is a member of the team.
En este episodio contamos con dos invitados especiales Carlos Cordeiro y Francisco Sandoval, que nos hablarán de los componentes críticos de los sistemas instrumentados de seguridad. Profundizaremos en el concepto de seguridad funcional, las nuevas tecnologías alrededor de ello y la relevancia de los sensores en un lazo de seguridad.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio16_Actualizacion-sobre-Seguridad-Funcional-SIS_mixdown.mp3
In this podcast, Emerson’s Kristin Steiner and Adam Thompson joined Jim Cahill to discussed the MyAssets digital toolset, as one of the components of the MyEmerson Personalized Digital Experience. MyAssets provides a single location where you can instantly access a digital installed base record of devices – smart and non-smart – at your plant, regardless of manufacturer.
En este episodio el experto Guillermo Marván, nos guía sobre las consideraciones básicas para el adecuado mantenimiento de los elementos finales de control, las capacidades de Emerson en Latinoamérica para el acompañamiento de la vida útil de sus válvulas, además de compartirnos las más recientes innovaciones en cuanto a servicios a base instalada se refiere.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio15_Como-optimizar-la-vida-util-de-elementos-de-Control-Final.mp3
En este episodio conversamos con nuestra Gerente de ventas para hidrocarburos No Convencionales y Líder del Centro de Tecnología Emerson Neuquén - Patricia Cioni, sobre los principales desafíos de la producción de shale y cómo la automatización permite la producción de estos pozos de forma segura, rápida y eficiente. Exploramos el ecosistema de soluciones y tecnologías disruptivas que Emerson provee a la industria desde consultoría y gestión de datos, hasta sistemas de control y mediciones de las variables de proceso.
Escucha el episodio completo y suscríbete a nuestro canal para conocer más sobre las diferentes innovaciones en automatización industrial.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio14_Innovacion-tecnologica-en-el-area-de-No-Convencionales-o-Shale.mp3
En este episodio conversamos con nuestro Director de Industria para Oil and Gas - Manuel Arroyo, sobre los retos que se perciben actualmente en Latinoamérica para las terminales de almacenamiento y cómo la automatización y digitalización de operaciones habilitan la optimización, seguridad y rendimiento de las instalaciones.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio13_Automatizacion-para-terminales-de-almacenamiento.mp3
En este episodio la especialista Teresa Flores nos habla sobre soluciones de control para industrias discretas, controladores industriales inteligentes, interfaces de operador, PAC/PLCs y cómo Emerson mejora las operaciones de la planta y conecta los datos desde el Edge de las máquinas a la sala de control a través de la adquisición que hoy forma Machine Automation Solutions.
No olvides suscribirte al podcast para ser de los primeros en escuchar nuestros episodios cada viernes.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio12_Introduciendo-el-nuevo-portafolio-Machine-Automation-Solutions.mp3
El experto en Instrumentación de Medición y Analítica, Mauricio Pulido nos guiará sobre las generalidades de los elemento primarios en la medición DPFlow.
Conoceremos a profundidad los criterios de selección más adecuados, la gama de tecnologías Emerson en medición por presión diferencial, así como las mejores prácticas en la optimización y ahorro de costos en diseño, instalación y consumo energético.
Este es el décimo episodio de la serie: Tecnologías de Flujo o Caudal.
Suscríbete hoy para no perderte ningún episodio.
https://media.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/content.blubrry.com/emersonprocessxperts/Episodio11_Medicion-DPFlow-Mixdown.mp3