Next* Magazine, Issue 5 - Chevron

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
High in a Houston office tower, the
info-tech-savvy team at Chevron’s
Machinery Support Center (MSC)
monitors thousands of pieces of
equipment on six continents in real
time, including hundreds of units in
Kazakhstan and two massive compressors
in Colombia that deliver enough
natural gas to supply approximately
65 percent of that nation’s demand.
Stuffed with screens and software, the new nerve center is
already making a difference. Each day, for example, operators
at Chevron’s big Sanha Field off the coast of southern
Africa inject millions of cubic feet of natural gas, an essential
task at a complex facility that produces millions of barrels of
ultra-light oil per year. When a compressor recently showed
subtle signs of overloading, the first person to notice was
6,000 miles (9,656 km) away in the MSC.
The busy crew at Sanha would have found the problem,
but now this and other Chevron Upstream operations have
solid backup to detect any similar situations in other locations
with the teams and technologies at the global MSC,
which evolved from an earlier surveillance center conceived
to monitor compressors in the Gulf of Mexico and California.
“The crew acted on the MSC‘s tip and avoided a couple
of million dollars in downtime and lost production,” said Fred
Schleich, machinery and electrical power system manager at
Chevron Energy Technology Co.
Until recently, the MSC was just a proposal. Today it‘s one
of several elaborate technology solutions in an orchestrated
Chevron initiative called Upstream Workflow Transformation,
or UWT. The new program follows a decade of investment
in infrastructure and instrumentation—mostly in Chevron’s
North America operations—under a broad business priority
known as the digital oil field. Now the company wants to
extend the proven solutions and safety gains from its U.S.
oil and gas fields to its operations on six continents.
Big Prizes Await the Winners
Helped by other companies—Microsoft, SAIC, Schlumberger
and more—Chevron set out to reinvent and automate
operations using existing, emerging and yet-to-be-developed
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