Why Denison Gas Added a Canary Process Historian

There comes a point when an organisation needs quality data to lift production management and operational efficiency, most often soon after assets are brought online and the control systems are already in use. As system requirements mature, opportunities for improvement begin to surface, and good data is the foundation for measuring the operational uplift needed to justify change. What's less tangible than improved asset performance is the value that inevitably surfaces once new data consumers start discovering patterns in operations and maintenance impacts get exposed for the first time, the gold nuggets hidden below the surface.

Denison Gas operates two gas fields, centred around two separate SCADA servers at Yellowbank and Rolleston. Bringing the two SCADA systems together has obvious benefits for production management and planning, but extending an operational control system and centralising data creates benefits that reach well beyond what the SCADA technologies alone can offer.

Why Pair SCADA with a Process Historian

SCADA systems have long struggled to provide the functions a process historian offers. As a SCADA system gathers real-time data from field devices, detecting alarms, storing data, and alerting operators, that data typically lives in proprietary databases, files, or relational databases inside SCADA itself, which raises a few real challenges. A process historian provides isolation between the control system and corporate systems. SCADA is a poor data provider at scale, and the number of clients accessing it directly needs careful consideration when architecting the wider system. A single, consolidated data stream from SCADA to the process historian delivers the same data sets with new context, supports far more clients than SCADA can manage technically or cost-effectively, and can sit on a different network segment entirely, in the cloud, on premise, or a mix of both. For a cybersecurity specialist trying to isolate control systems from corporate users, that single managed connection is close to a dream outcome.

High-volume data users need vast datasets, sometimes years of data, for seasonal and production cycle evaluation. Heavy direct access to SCADA diminishes its performance and compromises operational integrity, and the larger the system, the bigger that impact. Because a process historian acquires data from SCADA at the same rate SCADA acquires it from field devices, it places virtually no extra load on the SCADA servers, good news for any business planning to expand. The right process historian can gather data from dozens of SCADA systems, building an enterprise view of asset performance not just over a short window, but across the entire asset lifecycle.

Time Series Data Integrity

Denison Gas chose the process historian pathway early in its system's lifecycle, giving the SCADA systems room to breathe. As they scale up, there's no risk that corporate users, planners, or other data consumers will ever impact control system operation, and no limitation imposed by SCADA having only a few direct clients or by the choice of historian technology itself.

Denison Gas's process historian natively supports time series data, functionally superseding what any relational database can offer. Because the SCADA layer also supports time series data, each value sampled in the field carries the exact time it was measured, with that value and timestamp staying attached as it moves through the system. Even when samples arrive a little late due to network interruptions, the system data ultimately stays synchronised. A snapshot report from the process historian gives a genuinely accurate view at any point in time, down to millisecond resolution, as accurate as each instrument's own calibration. Denison Gas's SCADA doesn't condition or truncate this data the way many systems do, the raw data stays intact, and the process historian preserves that integrity while serving rich data back to the business.

At a fraction of the cost of traditional enterprise systems, Denison Gas's Geo SCADA, paired with a Canary Labs Process Historian, provides the foundation for elevated production performance.