Inside the control room: the operations controller’s interview.

Our story on the digital field told the architecture: from sensors to decision-makers, a stack that carries the measurement upward. Here is the man sitting in the middle of the stack — light headset, open logbooks, four screens. A silent trade on which the night’s production, the safety of those sleeping near the facilities and the value of every counted barrel all depend.

So your trade is watching screens?

It is listening to a field. The screen is only the outer skin: behind it runs the telemetry — hundreds of measurement points flowing up from wells, pumps and tanks into the SCADA. Flow rates, pressures, temperatures, levels, valve states: the field talks continuously. My job is to know what that chatter means — and above all to hear the abnormal silence, the reading that stops moving when it should be alive.

An alarm goes off. What happens?

Nothing spectacular at first: we read. Every alarm has a priority, a written procedure and a history. Acknowledging is not solving: an alarm closes when its cause is understood, not when the noise stops. The real craft is hierarchy: telling the chatty alarm — a badly tuned sensor crying every ten minutes — from the rare alarm that demands action within the minute. A well-tuned control room is an almost silent one: every alarm that remains has earned its place.

Can you act on the facilities remotely?

Remote operation allows it: adjusting a setpoint, starting or stopping a pump, closing a motorised valve. But the golden rule lies elsewhere: never a remote action on equipment where somebody is working. Work permits, lock-outs, calls to the site supervisor: the distant hand respects the man on the spot. The control room is not a command post — it is a coordination post.

The worst reflex in this trade is trusting a figure you have not questioned. The screen does not replace the field: it makes an appointment with it.

The digital twin — gadget or tool?

A tool — when you use it as a contradictor. The digital twin tells me what the field should be doing in the conditions of the moment; the SCADA tells me what it is doing. As long as the two tell the same story, all is well. When they diverge, the gap is the start of an investigation: fouling, an incipient leak, a drifting sensor, a well changing behaviour. You simulate before you touch, and maintenance becomes predictive instead of being a repair.

And if communications drop?

It happens — a satellite link has its moods. The site is designed to live alone: local automation holds the critical loops, the instrumented safety systems do not depend on me, and the control room picks up the thread on reconnection, history included. That is the principle of the sensor-to-decision-maker architecture: each layer can cope without the layer above. And the automation networks stay separated from everything else: cybersecurity here is not an IT word — it is industrial safety.

Where do you learn this trade, in Chad?

Too often abroad, as with gauging. That is exactly what EnerTchad’s training track wants to repatriate: reading operating screens, alarm management, degraded modes, the ethics of the logbook — and hours of simulator before the first real shift. A Chadian field operated by Chadians: sovereignty also runs through the control room.

What makes a good operations controller?

Someone calm, who writes everything down, and who distrusts the figure that looks too good. The perfect shift is the one where “nothing happened” — because everything was seen early, reported early, corrected early. Our success makes no noise: it looks like an ordinary night.