Remote Operations in Bolivia-Brazil Gas Pipeline - GASBOL

This technical paper has an objective to describe the remote operations of the Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline and present how it is done in the Supervision and Control Center including new technologies normally used to operate remotely. The Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline is the biggest pipeline in Latin America; the whole pipeline has 3,159 km length, where the most part of that is in the Brazilian ground of 2,593 km. TBG is a company that has the Brazilian trunk property and is responsible for its operations, which starts just at the Bolivian border. The pipeline started its operational activities in 1999 and was designed to operate with high technology and with the minimum field personal as possible. The pipeline has the maximum transport capacity of 30 million cubic meters per day. To reach this level is necessary to operate at the same time twelve compression stations along the pipeline and deliver gas for the customers in more than thirty-six-city-gates spread in five Brazilian states. From its Head Office in Rio de Janeiro, TBG controls remotely all of the pipeline’s operations along its entire length. It surveys the full extension of the pipeline 24 hours a day with two engineers, by satellite, using SCADA system (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition software) and a plenty of online and offline simulation softwares including leak detection systems, pig monitoring, gas inventory management, look-ahead, predictive and trainer modules, thereby increasing operational reliability and improving decision-making process. Almost every operation is possible to be done by control engineers as like as starting-up turbines, increasing and decreasing compression rotations or even open or close valves. The technology VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) and IP tunnels through the corporate WAN are both used to exchange data. The whole system now has more than 50,000 tags in real time database. Other important issue is that TBG doesn’t need any measurement staff in the field proceeding all the data acquisition. The whole measurement process is completely done at Supervision Control Room and at the same instant when data were collected the customer has the final certified volume in its hands.