Ushering in a New Era of Power Management for a Centenarian Oil Field

This paper presents a state-of-the-art power management system that was commissioned for an energy corporation at its central California oil field. This field consists of several reclosers dispersed over a wide geographic area. The electrical power requirements of the plant are met by 3 cogeneration plants, comprising 8 generators with a total installed capacity of around 25 MW and 1 utility tie-line connection. In the event of a disruptive blackout, the consequent downtime results in the loss of critical production and revenue, which necessitates a solution involving a smart and high-speed power management system. The power management system solution consists of load-shedding schemes that are contingency-based, underfrequency-based, progressive-based, and wireless radio-based. The solution also includes systems for supervisory control and data acquisition, automatic generation control, voltage control, islanding control, tie-line control, and advanced automatic synchronization. Additionally, there is a high-speed generation-shedding system that sheds excess generation to prevent generators from dropping under the environmental (NO
x
) emissions limit. This power management system has been commissioned successfully and has been in service since September 2019. This paper discusses different power management system capabilities, design philosophy, communications architecture, data flow, hardware-in-the-loop testing using a real-time, transient-level computer model of the power system, onsite lessons learned, field implementation, and real-time events that have occurred since the commissioning of this system.