David DeBari, technical team leader for ExxonMobil’s Open Process Automation (OPA) program, took the stage at the YNOW2024 conference with good news to share. “We’ve gone from asking if this could work to saying we can now do open process automation,” he told the audience. He pointed to ExxonMobil’s live plant using OPA technology in Baton Rouge, La., in which the company is cutting loops over from the plant’s legacy system to the OPA system. While running both systems currently, ExxonMobil expects to be running fully on the OPA system before the end of the year.
“We’ve been leading the charge, and it’s very important we set the pace,” he said of ExxonMobil’s project in Baton Rouge. “We need to prove to people that it can be done.”
It's a big step in the progression of OPA, which has had its industry doubters over the years, but DeBari said the commissioning of what ExxonMobil calls its lighthouse project means questions about OPA are no longer “if” but “when” it will happen.
The quest for open process automation still has a lot of development ahead, particularly as DeBari and his colleagues seek more collaboration with other end users and suppliers to further transition industry from closed and proprietary automation to an open and secure, standards-based system that promotes innovation and value creation.
“As a company, we can’t just tell the marketplace this is what we want and go build it,” he continued. “We need other end users and vendors getting interested and learning the technologies we’re talking about.”
He was also quick to point out that the technologies involved in open process automation aren’t new, but many are well proven within the IT realm. He and his colleagues believe many of those software technologies can be brought into the OT world.
“This is software-defined process control. Everything is software-based,” he said.
Why OPA?
ExxonMobil realized in 2010 that it had an obsolescence issue, and technology leaders at the company knew they needed to fix the slow rate of technology insertion into its automation systems. That was the genesis of the OPA project.
Since then, they’ve embarked on a 14-year (and counting) journey to enlist others in the industry to think similarly about open process automation. The initial Open Process Automation Standard (O-PAS) was a significant milestone. This year, they released version 2.1 of the standard, which DeBari said created an open architecture from which they could build systems.
Automation technology has evolved from systems with some advanced control, but mostly focused on talking to the I/O and running an application. Instead, today they’re a lot more about advanced control because of the benefits versus, say, a simple cascaded loop model. However, they are still closed systems, and a bit cumbersome to design, set up and operate. ExxonMobil saw a different future for automation systems.
“We knew we had to make systems easy enough that a technician can take care of it and doesn’t take a lot of [education and training],” DeBari said. “People are talking about autonomous plants, but how are you going to do that? That involves a lot of calculations and data. We need to do cognitive things.”
He believes OPA is the right direction to help in that regard. He pointed to emerging technologies, such as virtualization, that people will want to add to their automation systems. So, as more dynamic capabilities continue to emerge, thoughts of open architecture have taken hold.
“We want to take automation from closed and propriety to open and standards based, because we need innovation. We need to be able to do the technology insertion at any time, because we are being asked every day for value creation,” DeBari said.
The art of the possible
ExxonMobil may have spearheaded the quest for open process automation, but it is not alone in the pursuit. Several other end users and suppliers were also on hand at YNOW2024 to talk about their involvement in the OPA project, including Ravi Jagasia, R. Stahl; Jason Norris, Phoenix Contact; Sharul Rashid, Petronas; Kelly Swift, Red Hat; Kelly Li, also of ExxonMobil; and Mark Hammer, Yokogawa.
Yokogawa served as systems integrator for the ExxonMobil OPA prototype and testbed, but the project used a variety of vendors and a shared data model.
Following completion of the factory acceptance test (FAT) in May, ExxonMobil began shipping its OPA system from Yokogawa’s facility in Sugar Land, Texas, to ExxonMobil’s plant in Baton Rouge.
“Operators are running it and doing well,” DeBari said of the plant. “It’s a rip-and-replace project. We took out technology that was 40 years old.
“It demonstrates you can build a system using open process automation architecture,” he continued. “The O-PAS standard gives you the capability to make it interoperable, changeable, affordable.”
The lighthouse project also shows other end users that the time is now to start planning for this. “The early adopter train is leaving,” DeBari said. “You’re going to want this.”
He also reminded the automation suppliers in attendance they’ll need to build instrumentation with open process automation in mind. “We have to get everyone comfortable with change,” DeBari said. “The time to start learning about it and planning for it is now.”
