CASE STUDY · RENEWABLE NATURAL GAS · DATA INTEGRITY
When the system of record (data historian) stops collecting data and no one notices, it presents a critical issue that is often overlooked til it’s too late. This is something we have seen commonly happening in process industries, including biogas and biomethane.
|
CUSTOMER Two RNG Operating Sites |
CHALLENGE Upstream SCADA Data Outage |
OUTCOME Same-Day Detection, No Reporting Disruption |
THE CHALLENGE
For operators in the Renewable Fuel Standard and Low Carbon Fuel Standard programs, the historian is the system of record. Flow, composition, and runtime values pass from it into the calculations that produce RINs and LCFS credits, which means the regulatory and financial value of a month’s production rests on an unbroken data stream from the operational control system (SCADA).
But sometimes it does break. The cause sometimes is unknown — a configuration change, a service-side fault; the diagnosis sat behind an organizational boundary neither operator could cross. And to find the root cause takes time, costing the producer a hefty sum in lost environmental attributes. At times, the SCADA provider itself was unaware the interruption was occurring. In one case, roughly two weeks passed before the issue was addressed at its source.
Hence, it is imperative that a redundant system is in place and a failsafe mechanism automatically alerts and runs, just like a backup generator switching on automatically when there is electricity outage. Rimba is the brain that runs these separate systems. It detects the outage and automatically switches to the alternate method of data capture. Then it transforms the data to the required format of each individual compliance program based on the methodology set out in the protocols/rules.
|
CHALLENGES |
|
THE SOLUTION
Rimba actively monitors the data from systems it integrates with. Instead of simply reporting on data once it arrives, the platform first confirms whether the data is there and available for retrieval.
Over the past several months, Rimba built automated checks into its own data pipeline. These checks confirm, continuously and without any manual intervention, that data is arriving on schedule, within expected ranges, for every site. When Rimba’s internal systems show no failure, the problem must be upstream, and it triggers an alert to the customers that the data stream has stopped.
At Rimba, we also set up redundancies to retrieve back-up SCADA data, through the site’s engineering workstation, independent of the primary provider connection. When that primary source failed, Rimba switched to the backup path to recover the missing data. As a result, both operators closed out the month with everything they needed to generate RINs and LCFS credits, on the normal schedule.
BUSINESS IMPACT
Both the operator and the SCADA provider were first notified of the outage by Rimba. An issue that might otherwise have gone undetected for weeks was instead identified and communicated within the same day, with the root cause traced to a system external to both the platform and the plant. As a result, the RNG producer was able to complete its monthly batch reporting and monetization on schedule, with no disruption to normal operations.
|
Same day Outage detection vs. weeks at the source |
|
No Disruption Affected sites closed the month on schedule |
ABOUT RIMBA
Rimba is an AI-native operational compliance platform built for energy companies such as renewable fuel producers, feedstock traders, logistics providers, and industrial operators managing environmental reporting obligations. The platform is used by small producers to Fortune 500 companies in the Renewable Diesel (RD), Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), Ethanol, and Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) value chain.