Background on Danish Offshore Gas Systems (DOGS)
Ørsted is the owner of an offshore gas pipeline system in the Danish part of the North Sea in which natural gas is transported from the offshore production platforms and into Energinet’s onshore transmission system. The Ørsted affiliate, Danish Offshore Gas Systems A/S (DOGS), operates the system and offers access to transportation customers (shippers) to transport its gas volumes through the pipeline system.
DOGS has built an IT system that manages the day-to-day commercial gas transport operations of the offshore pipeline system. This system had to be renewed & this is where Energy One jumped in.
Energy One and Ørsted – a longstanding collaboration
Energy One Belgium has been working with Ørsted since 2018, when it became its supplier of nomination and balancing operations software for their natural gas portfolio spanning eight European countries. Watch this short testimonial to see how it all started:
Energy One has been a reliable and trustworthy agile service provider and partner for Ørsted the last six years. It was only natural that the company contacted Energy One towards the end of 2022 to see if we would be able to deliver on the business requirements for a new gas transport IT system for DOGS by the start of the new ‘gas year’ on 1 October 2023. The system has been named MOPS, which stands for Management Offshore Pipeline System.
The MOPS System is not the first time Energy One Belgium has built a custom solution. In 2021-22 we have developed two custom asset management solutions for clients; one for a power plant, as well as a natural gas Storage Management Application. The learnings from these projects were instrumental in developing this solution for Orsted. Let’s take a closer look at the solution we’ve built.
The solution in a nutshell
MOPS (Management Offshore Pipeline System) is used by the dispatching and operations team at the Pipeline Operator (DOGS A/S in this case). It handles the following:
- Enables market communication between gas lifters, offshore & onshore gas shippers and the TSO of the onshore gas network (Energinet)
- Nominations and matching
- Fetching PRISMA Capacity Bookings
- Allocations
- Displaying data from the Baltic Pipe, which also arrives at the redelivery point onshore
- Balancing
- Audit logs
- Generating monthly invoices & allocation reports for the offshore shippers
- Master data and other settings to ensure it’s easy to set-up new shippers, etc.
Many of these modules will look familiar for companies already using one of our bespoke solutions or egssPort Gas.
A fully automatic exception-driven workflow
Gas platforms in the North Sea operated by the platform Operators will have the gas lifter’s gas ‘shipped’ by ‘offshore shippers’ towards the redelivery point in Denmark at Nybro. The following diagram shows the communication and data flows involved:
MOPS is an exception-driven system, meaning that the operators of the offshore system will get an alert only when something requires their attention and/or intervention, such as:
- Not enough availability after availability check
- Not enough capacity after capacity check
- Mismatch between nominated volumes & nomination response volumes
- Mismatch between delivery order & delivery response
- Daily/hourly Imbalances
- Expected messages are missing
The system can trigger mails, in-app alerts and/or pop-ups pop-ups to notify dispatching:
The market communication, calculations and checks all flow automatically, based on the data sent to the system. While the system is working on auto-pilot, it is entirely possible to nominate and adjust manually in case of emergency, for example if one of the shippers has an issue that prevents them sending their nomination data automatically to the system.
When there is a manual input or change in a value done by the operator, the rest of the workflow will resume automatically. For example, if an operator changes a few hourly values, the system will generate new Delivery Orders, Nomination Responses, etc.
Overview of specific features
Here we highlight a few specific features that we believe deserve your attention:
Capacity bookings are sent from PRISMA via their API to the MOPS platform, however they can also add capacity bookings manually in case the API does not work due to technical reasons. Furthermore, operators have the option to manually add corrections to the upper limit of capacity for a specific shipper.
Planned or unplanned outages can be added into the system. By setting the capacity after reduction due to the outage the system will then incorporate the data for its calculations for the duration of the outage.
Allocations are also shown, with entry allocations showing the gas coming from the offshore platforms, which the ‘gas lifters’ are sending to their respective shipper. A single gas lifter can only be linked to one offshore shipper, however each offshore shipper can be connected to multiple gas lifters. These relationships can be set-up in the ‘management module’ of MOPS.
Exit allocations are also calculated in the system, and our solution calculates and shows the hourly value returned by the internal system (MOPS), as well as a control value based on the exit allocations we receive from the TSO (Energinet). At the end of the day, a check is made to see if these two values are matched, and the system allows manual corrections to override the mismatches generated by MOPS.
The Balancing module shows an overview of the balance per shipper for each hour. It also shows the starting value, delta, entry and exit allocations, correction factors, and so forth.
Finally, the system is also able to generate Monthly Invoices and Allocation Reports for each shipper, which the Pipeline Systems Operator sends to the offshore shippers active on the Danish offshore gas grid.
Are you interested in exploring the possibilities for a specific asset you have to manage? Interested in a deeper-dive into the system? If so, please do not hesitate to contact us and our experts will be in touch.
