Universal Wellpad Control: An Open Automation and Control Platform with Zero-Trust and Zero-Touch Provisioning System
Authors: Cheng Tao , Moore Pat , Samara-Rubio Dean , Lee Seongwoo 
Published: October 2022

The oil and gas companies generally design and engineering their capital intensive assets for the goal of multi-decades operations. Thus the technology screening and selection has never been taken lightly because the company is relying on these technologies for the considerable life of the asset. Historically, the oil and gas industry has selected automation and control solutions from large system providers for reliable service which leads to limited service operations and technology obsolescence challenge through the asset management lifetime. Oil and gas operators, through venues such as the Open Group's OPAFTM and OSDUTM Forums (OSDU), have an opportunity to define the next generation of automation and control systems that break the conventional paradigm of reliance on proprietary systems, with their associated "vendor lock-in", limited availability of new features and innovation, and the costs of managing supply chain for single-source products and product obsolescence.

The adoption of the information technologies (IT) into the next generation operational technologies (OT) solutions must eliminate the barriers to scaling by delivering fit-for-purpose, reliable, long-lived, secure, and interoperable systems. The approach being pursued by ExxonMobil, Intel, Red Hat, and our partners is to break the hardware and software inter-dependency that has been inherent to closed proprietary process control systems by, (1) leveraging advances in open architecture framework design concepts for software development and integration, (2) enabling interoperability in application software with defined functions including machine learning and analytic techniques, (3) hardening the zero-trust security model (Scott Rose, 2020) with zero-touch device management (Reeves, 2019), and (4) ensuring secure robust channels for control applications to communicate from the edge systems to control centers and/or cloud.

This paper describes the open automation and control platform for upstream oil and gas operators enabling their field controls, optimization, and analytics with a secure zero-trust and zero-touch multi-vendor solution. The proposed open automation architecture has evolved through a sequence of evaluations described in this paper and validated through a field trial by ExxonMobil where the commercial edge device was loaded with a Linux operating system with fully pre-emptible real time kernel (preempt-RT) (Linux Foundation, n.d.), the Open Edge Insights (OEI) middleware (Intel Corporation, n.d.), and a plunger lift well control application from Naonworks. This software stack controlled the well with 100 millisecond response time. The system operated the plunger lift well continuously for 6-months powered only by a solar panel and lead acid battery. The well production process was not only controlled locally but had remote access for supervisory monitoring and control.

In parallel with the extended field trial, the team has ported the solution to work with the Red Hat operating system, security, and system management infrastructure as well as the integration of secure device onboarding (FIDO Alliance, n.d.). The objective is to demonstrate a complete chain of trust from device manufacture through application deployment, application runtime, and lifecycle management. Currently, the technologies are being presented and validated to OSDUTM member companies in the OSDU Edge lab.