COLOMBIA: Cenit (Ecopetrol) opens a new operations center for fuel transport
Cenit, an affiliate of the Ecopetrol Group focused on hydrocarbon transportation and logistics, inaugurated in December its Integrated Operations Center, a control room that will allow it to remotely manage the operation of all the country’s hydrocarbon transportation systems.
According to its president, Héctor Manosalva, the company will reduce its costs by 15% and increase its effectiveness by up to 98%.
This center will have real time information, it will allow for a comprehensive vision of the operation and will adopt new prediction and diagnostic technologies, which is trasnlated in a greater opportunity in the transportation service, better quality in the tracking of the products transported and a more adequate management of the capacities of each system.
Manosalva commented in an interview to the newspaper La Republica that this type of projects nowadays worldwide are not made with investment resources due to the accelerated technological updating. “Currently, technology is not acquired, what is done is to acquire a technology supply service. In our case, our technological ally is Honeywell, which is in charge of updating the equipment and technological infrastructure to guarantee levels of reliability and maintenance close to 100%. There are no investment figures, we pay a monthly cost for this technology and its permanent updating”.
According to him, energy savings will be close to 10%, savings of 20% in the use of friction reducers, which is an important additive required in the systems to increase pumping capacities, and increase the efficiency of the network in general from 92% to 99%.
“This allows us to deliver products to different customers who use the system with greater quality, opportunity and in a safer way”.
For Ecopetrol Group’s President, Felipe Bayón, “the CIO materializes the digital transformation in the transportation segment, a bet in which we have been advancing from the different segments of the Ecopetrol Group’s value chain. This new center is the brain of Colombia’s hydrocarbon transport, which uses technology to guarantee a safe, reliable and efficient operation”.
In addition, this new center will allow the company to perform constant remote monitoring and follow key business indicators in real time for timely decision making. In addition, in the event of an attack or an illicit valve, it will allow for a faster suspension of pumping, closing of valves and avoidance of primary containment losses that could affect communities, the environment and the infrastructure itself.
