Brazilian End User Seminar is a Success

Our Brazilian Marketing Committee organized and held our most recent end user seminar on Thursday, June 16th at the Windsor Barra Hotel & Congressos in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil is a hotbed of fieldbus adoption right now. Major end users such as Petrobras are making significant investments in FOUNDATION Fieldbus. The seminar attracted roughly 150 attendees from end users to suppliers to systems integrators. The keynote address was given by Dr. Gunther Kegel, the new Chairman of the Fieldbus Foundation Board of Directors and CEO of Pepperl+Fuchs. Dr. Kegel listed some key FOUNDATION Fieldbus installations in Brazil, where the technology is in use in over a dozen refineries, several offshore platforms, and many other installations which, for end user Petrobras alone, accounts for around 70,000 fieldbus devices. Local supplier Smar also has many fieldbus installations throughout the country. Omar Sacilotto Donaire of Smar gave an update on the FOUNDATION Technology roadmap. Other end user presenters included Elaine da Silva of Petrobras and Ronaldo Neves Ribeiro and Alessandro S. Castro of Celulose Nipo Brasileira (a leading Brazilian pulp producer).

Fieldbus Foundation Chairman Dr. Gunther Kegel Delivers the Keynote Address

With all the fieldbus activity in Brazil, there is a strong demand for training. LEAD is in the process of becoming a certified FOUNDATION Fieldbus training center under our FCTP program, and Miguel Borges from Petrobras/Cenpes provided on update on LEAD’s status and future plans. Fieldbus Foundation’s Brazil Marketing Committee Chairman and Pepperl+Fuchs Marketing Director Augusto Pereira of Pepperl+Fuchs gave a presentation on bests practices for fieldbus project implementation. The seminar concluded with a presentation from another end user, Claudio Sperb from Braskem, on successful project implementation. The Braskem example is interesting because it involves ethanol production. Brazil implemented a comprehensive ethanol fuel production program to deal with the oil crunch of the 1970s and has been a leader in ethanol production ever since. Today, it is the second largest producer of ethanol in the world and has some of the most advanced production processes. Most of the country’s ethanol comes from widely available sugar cane.

The presentations can all be downloaded at the Fieldbus Foundation Forums web site, but you must be a registered user to download. Registration is free and only takes a minute. Warning: most presentations are, understandably, in Portuguese.