Caterpillar Condition Monitoring Technology Proves Value to Customers

For Worldwide Release: Oct 2012
Release Number: GP12PR14

Technology Improves Proactive Equipment Management, Decreases Downtime

Houston, TX – Caterpillar Global Petroleum has been powering the oil and gas industry around the globe for almost eighty years. An integral factor into the company’s undisputed success is the service support that underscores the consistent reliability delivered by Cat^® products. Responding to the evolving needs of customers and the increasing complexity of engines and generator sets, Caterpillar developed a Condition Monitoring service to address the mounting challenges in today’s oil and gas applications.

“The driving factor behind the development of Condition Monitoring was to ensure Cat products consistently and continually operated at peak performance,” said David Krenek, Caterpillar Global Petroleum Market Professional.  “Technologies were chosen for the service to increase the runtime of Cat products and decrease owning and operating costs and ease some of the challenges encountered in equipment fleet management.”

The service has proved to be of value to numerous Cat customers. Customers who have integrated Condition Monitoring into their maintenance strategies have experienced improvements in uptime, including increased time between outages, decreased callouts and early detection of product issues. “At our Ponder compressor station, we have 2x Cat 3612 engines with Ariel compressors.  Both units are required to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” remarked Marlan Jarzombek, Atmos Energy Corporation Manager for Storage and Compression. “The station is manned 5 days during normal business hours but unmanned at night and on the weekends; this gap in operational surveillance is where the Condition Monitoring system has been especially helpful.”

The Condition Monitoring service integrates aggregation of high fidelity data and automated analytics to provide early warning of changes in engine performance that are potentially caused by component degradation. Recommendations are created through root cause analysis and are shared with the asset operator in weekly update meetings to develop corrective actions before an unscheduled outage occurs. The web-based service provides visibility of asset health and equipment performance to various stakeholders in the customer’s organization through real time data monitoring.

Jarzombek added, “The system also provides data trend history; this is a very valuable tool.  We have access to a website where we can look at the same data as the Caterpillar experts, giving us a better feel for the health of our engines. As a result of implementing the Condition Monitoring system, we have achieved 99% runtime and the interactions between our plant operator and Caterpillar experts have proved very helpful as well by increasing operator knowledge of this equipment.”

All Cat products are backed by the worldwide Cat dealer network with trained technicians to ensure service support is never out of reach.  To view a live demonstration of the Condition Monitoring technology, please visit the Caterpillar booth at the upcoming 2012 GMRC Gas Machinery Research Council (GMRC show), booth 432. For more information, visit catoilandgasinfo.com.

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Note to Editors: Caterpillar rolls-out products and services in each of its territories at different time intervals. Although every effort is made to ensure that product information is released only after Caterpillar has received confirmation from our dealer network, our plants, and our marketing subsidiaries that products and services are available in the relevant region, editors are kindly requested to verify with their local dealer for product availability and specifications.

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Jenna Janik
Tel: +1.713.895.1449
Janik_Jenna_E@cat.com