Romania, an EU member country in southeast Europe, has been developing natural gas for a century. The Neogene Transylvanian Basin is approximately 5000 feet below central Romania and has been assessed and ranked by the USGS to be the 56th largest petroleum basin in the world. The field is nearly all natural gas with only small pockets of oil. Romgaz SA is the national gas production company engaged in exploration, production and gas storage for supply management.  The methane rich (98%) gas supplies nearly half of Romania’s consumption.

Increasing gas demand necessitated the addition of compression which resulted in an order for two new Cameron Superior 12SGTD engines driving Superior WH-74 frames with pipeline compressors.  Romgaz and Cameron nominated Petrostar, a Romanian company, to package the units to be located at the Cristuru compressor station. The two new packaged units are now installed in a new building., The new units replace four older existing Russian units that will eventually be decommissioned.  The station gathers gas from wells via five pipelines and is compressed at Cristuru and sent via pipeline to a processing plant. 

United Control Group (UCG), the provider of Cameron’s CleanBurn®IV engine control system, was selected to provide the complete package control system. The CleanBurn®IV uses Cameron’s parameters for engine control, and is based on an Allen-Bradley CompactLogix PLC with 10” PanelView touch screen display.  The CleanBurn®IV systems consist of three modular enclosures per system, as follows:

The modular topology allows I/O to be placed near the equipment, minimizing tubing and wiring runs, allowing for pre-testing of assemblies.  This approach results in substantially lower installation time and installation costs, when compared with a typical centralized I/O system.  Further, the engine remote panel can be mounted in any convenient location, within approx 100 meters [328 ft] from the panel.

Per Romgaz specifications the units are operated purely in manual control mode from front of panel, with remote data displayed on third party DCS in a separate control room adjacent to the compressor building.

Since their startup the units have achieved very high availability rates, and have easily met the station flow requirements.  The Plant Chief is pleased with the control systems and touch screen interface, and has commented on the ease of use to operate and visualize the operation of the system.   All operator display screens are English/ Romanian text with the ability to switch engineering units between metric to English.