Being a planning centre for any activities involving suppliers and customers, PETRONAS Gas Control Center (PGCC) involves in challenging tasks of coordinating various type of operation and maintenance activities like offshore, compressor and plant shutdown, curtailment planning and customers' low demand planning during holiday period. Planning simply based on operators' experience and rule of thumb will give room for errors and inconsistent results. Hydraulic simulation was given a bigger role since 2006 in shutdown coordination and maintenance planning. Various scenarios for various types of activities were simulated and the results were presented in operational and planners meeting. Important decisions were made based on simulation trending. This paper will highlight some of the most important activities that were planned based on the hydraulic simulation, the comparison between simulated and actual profile and the challenges that still lie ahead.
PETRONAS Gas was incorporated in Malaysia on 23 May 1983 under the Companies Act, 1965, as a private limited company and commenced business on 1 April 1984. It was initially a wholly own subsidiary of PETRONAS and known as PETRONAS Gas Sdn Bhd. The Company was converted into a public limited company and changed its name to PETRONAS Gas Bhd (PGB) on 28 March 1995. PGB was formed to serve as the platform to implement the Peninsular Gas Utilisation (PGU) project. The principal activities of the Company consist of the processing of natural gas produced from the gas fields offshore the East Coast of Peninsular Malaysia and the transmission of the processed gas to end-users throughout Peninsular Malaysia and to Singapore. Apart from the PGU system in Peninsular Malaysia, PGB also owns and operates two gas distribution systems in East Malaysia. In this regard, PGB operates as a throughput service company providing the service of processing and transmission of gas to the various customers on behalf of PETRONAS for a fee as set out in a the Gas Processing and Transmission Agreement(GPTA). In expanding the business, PGB had also diversified into Centralised Utility Facilities (CUF) business that involves marketing, manufacturing and supplying of industrial utility products such as electricity, steam, industrial gases and also waste water treatment services to manufacturing plants in the Integrated Petrochemical Complexes in Terengganu and Pahang. The commercial operations of CUF commenced in January 2000. With regards to its CUF business, PGB operates as a commercial provider of industrial utilities products and services to its own customers, with whom it has concluded individual Sale and Purchase Agreements. The various processed products are transmitted via pipelines to PETRONAS customers in the power, industrial and commercial sectors. Processed gas is also supplied to Senoko and Keppel Energy in Singapore through the PGU network.
