Project Profile:

GRAccess

Sentinel Peak Resources

Customer Background

Sentinel Peak Resources (SPR) is an upstream oil and gas company responsible for heavy oil development and extraction. The company owns and operates several sites throughout California, most located in the Central Valley area.

Project Background

Sentinel Peak Resources recently completed the acquisition of oil wells and associated assets from Seneca Resources, including their automation infrastructure. However, it was evident that the acquired automation infrastructure needed adequate cybersecurity measures. The existing system posed a significant risk, as unauthorized individuals could gain control of the SCADA system simply by accessing a local control screen. Addressing this issue required updating and validating hundreds of thousands of settings within the AVEVA System Platform galaxy.

Securing the system would have been an extensive and time-consuming endeavor. It would take a full-time employee over four years to complete this process to cover all the necessary updates and validations. Not only was this timeline infeasible, but it also posed a significant financial burden. Based on standard billable rates, undertaking this project would exceed $2 million, making it prohibitively expensive for Sentinel Peak Resources.

EA Solutions

Software solutions are pivotal in unlocking value for our team and the end client in these situations with a seemingly impossible schedule and budget constraints. Our innovation department leveraged AVEVA’s GRAccess Toolkit to interface with the AVAEVA System Platform Galaxy via a custom program to address the challenge. This program was able to log existing security configurations and the updates to them, which were executed programmatically. Leveraging this innovative software solution made the time and budget constraints irrelevant while removing the human error associated with manually implementing bulk changes.