Emerson’s Wireless Pressure Gauges Modernize Well Monitoring and Enhance Safety at BP Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay Unit

SHAKOPEE, Minn (August 22, 2019) -- The Alaska Oil and Gas Association has awarded the “Alaska Oil & Gas Project of the Year for Environmental Stewardship and Innovation” to BP Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay Unit Well Operating Limits Project. The three-year program began in 2016 and involved the field-wide installation of Emerson’s Rosemount™ Wireless Pressure Gauges at the Prudhoe Bay field helping transform how the wells are monitored.

Rosemount Wireless Pressure Gauges contribute to decreased personnel and environmental risk by providing improved visibility into well integrity without the need to physically enter the well, protecting personnel from potentially hazardous conditions. Additionally, automated real-time data and greater process insight provide early notification of well anomalies, reducing the risk of an event.

The Alaska Oil & Gas Project of the Year for Environmental Stewardship and Innovation honors an Alaska project that demonstrates superior environmental stewardship in design, construction, or operation, and/or an innovative approach that sets a new standard for industry design, construction, or operation in Alaska.

Working closely with Emerson and PCE Pacific, Inc., BP installed more than 3,500 Rosemount Wireless Pressure Gauges on upstream wellheads at Prudhoe Bay for year-round remote pressure monitoring. Rosemount gauges were selected because of their reliability, wireless communication capabilities, easy-to-read local display and simplified installation. 

The Rosemount gauges replaced existing mechanical pressure gauges that required personnel to perform manual readings on more than 1,700 wells under potentially hazardous conditions due to the extreme weather in Prudhoe Bay, which at times can reach 50 degrees below zero Celsius.

The automated wireless data provided by Rosemount Wireless Pressure Gauges offers updates at a rate of once per minute, as opposed to the once per day frequency of the mechanical gauges. The granularity and immediacy of the data has been valuable for improving well management, decreasing response times, and preventing potential events. This has also helped to reduce manual data entry. In addition, both data quality and read frequency increased over the previous manual methods.