Santos GLNG (LNG, Australia)

Expanding to Meet Demand​​​​​​​
Santos, one of Australia’s leading natural gas producers, had dual business goals for its recent upstream hub expansion works. First, add compression capability to the Roma hub. Second, build internal expertise and deliver cost savings by self-executing the project. The teams accomplished both goals — with time to spare.
Santos teams self-executed project management, planning, scheduling, and cost controlling. From FEED to start up, Santos’ teams engaged directly with the system configuration.

Real Savings, Virtual Collaboration
To ensure consistency and precise communications, the Santos and Emerson teams needed a way to coordinate system updates and key project input deliverables from various OEM packages. A real, virtual answer took shape: Remote Virtual Office (RVO), one of the key technology enablers in Emerson’s Project Certainty initiative.
RVO directly helped reduce project complexity and eliminated costs. Santo’s system architecture, controllers, instrument parameters, and more could be set up on servers for worldwide connections to a single project database and configuration. 

The project benefited from: 
• Streamlined virtual collaboration: RVO technology enabled replication of the Santos’ existing DeltaV™ distributed control system configuration. Team members around the world easily developed the new configuration as well as tested and confirmed interaction with the current version. 
• Effective use of time: The team called on a variety of global experts — who had small blocks of availability — to complete tasks efficiently.

From Execution to Testing with Little Travel and No Disruption
Team members around the world viewed and worked on the DCS while connected to the central server. Because system development and testing required no DCS hardware and very little office space, Santos realized savings.
Rather than perform a complete standard Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) in Melbourne, far from the customer site, the team developed a virtual FAT where a Melbourne-based team member worked concurrently on testing without travelling to the customer site. RVO enabled transition from execution to testing with no disruption.

Project Delivery on Time and on Budget
Santos’ strategies matured as they developed project methodologies that integrated Emerson project best practices. They delivered a high-quality project on time and on budget.