The liquefied natural gas industry is active in building new greenfield facilities. These new facilities have the opportunity to take advantage of technological advances in automation and the digitalization of work processes. Valves, actuators, and regulators play a crucial role in this challenging cryogenic process's overall safety, efficiency, and reliability.

In this podcast, Emerson’s Riyaz Ali and Tom Mullins share the story of an LNG producer and how they applied digitalization in their project design and installation to deliver integrated solutions to improve the project schedule and ongoing operational performance. Digitalization enables predictive maintenance practices to avoid unplanned downtime and optimize maintenance budgets.

Give the podcast a listen and visit the Valves, Actuators and Regulators for the Entire LNG Value Chain section on Emerson.com for more information on the broadest portfolio of valves, actuators, and regulators with critical isolation and control technologies.

Also, visit the LNG Success Podcast page to listen to other podcasts in this series.


Transcript
Jim: Hi, everyone. I'm Jim Cahill with another "Emerson Automation Experts" podcast. Today we're on another episode in our four-part series that explores the role of control technologies in helping drive efficient and reliable LNG production. Emerson's valves, regulators, and actuators empower the entire LNG value chain, from the liquefaction process to transport and terminals, and from project startup and commissioning to long-term facility operations and maintenance. Today we're talking about digitalization, enhanced efficiency, and safety in an LNG project. And we'll look at the very compelling customer success story. Our guests today are Riyaz Ali and Tom Mullins from Emerson. Riyaz is a senior director for FIELDVUE Business Development and a subject matter expert for Digital Solutions for Basic Process Control Systems and Safety Instrumented Systems. Tom is the director of Projects and Strategic Accounts with Emerson's Actuation Technologies business. Welcome, gentlemen.

Tom: Hey, Jim. Good to be here.

Riyaz: Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here.

Jim: Well, it's great having you both with us. So, Tom, I'm going to pick on you to start with. Can you give us an overview of how digitalization is transforming the LNG industry? I guess particularly in Greenfield projects, what role does it play in enhancing efficiency and safety, for example?

Tom: Sure, Jim. Today we're going to be talking more about isolation valves and actuation on top of those valves. And specifically to that point, over the last 10 to 15 years, what's really changed is our customers are starting to ask for more stringent closure times and opening times around these big valves. That's derived from the safety instrument loop there that's being required. So every data sheet now has a specific safe closure time. And now every actuator on every valve needs to meet, or exceed, or do better than what that time is. So 15 years ago, you didn't see closing times on every valve actuator assembly or data sheet. Now you do. So with that and the use of some of our equipment, like the DVC SIS we're going to talk about today, we're able to not only meet and exceed the closing times but also track the fact that the customer, you know, met those times, which is very important to test the safety instrument loop.