Natural Gas Producers Use Cat Productivity Optimizer to Reduce Downtime & Costs

For gas compression fleet operators, production is critical—and that means reducing unplanned downtime and bottlenecks is a priority. Up to now, identifying the root causes of outages to prevent costly shutdowns has been a challenge. Enter Cat® Productivity Optimizer (CPO). This web-based application simplifies the process, gathering essential data from compressors and giving natural gas producers a real-time look at individual and fleet performance.

“The downtime reporting feature allows you to see reliability, availability and utilization on a fleet-wide basis,” says Phil Tardif of PHILTECH Corporation, a specialist in compressor fleet management and technical support. “The cause of compressor downtime isn’t always the compressor itself—sometimes it’s related to well behavior or gathering system events. With CPO, you can quickly look at the entire fleet, spot opportunities to improve performance, forecast potential concerns that could impact production and identify the root cause of downtime. It provides data to focus on fixing the problem.”

Tardif’s experience as a CPO user dates back more than 10 years. In fact, in a previous position, he worked for a natural gas producer that used the application as a condition monitoring tool for 200+ gas compression units. CPO reported on optimization opportunities and operational concerns, such as cylinder valve issues, flow restrictions, inefficient power consumption and engine overload.

“CPO’s database incorporating equipment-specific information is instantly available anytime a unit review is required,” Tardif says. “Being able to view fleet characteristics and key performance indicators greatly simplifies the task of a fleet manager.”

CPO collects operational data from any available electronic data source, as well as through a web-based manual input interface. Data can be added from online diagnostics tools (like vibration monitoring and flow measurement) to manage alarms and provide a single condition monitoring report to the operator.

“By using CPO as a condition-based monitoring tool, natural gas producers can wrap their arms around an entire fleet,” says Bill Gibb, a CPO consultant. “Once that’s accomplished, they’re ready to move into the optimization space and discover how CPO can help them find more gas.”

To do that, CPO analyzes a compressor’s current production levels and compares it to how much gas it could be producing—and in many cases, it finds a gap. With this information in hand, customers can quickly reconfigure their compressors to take advantage of the additional production opportunity.