Grayslake Gate Station

The original Grayslake Gate Station, constructed in 1941, supplies natural gas to a majority of North Shore Gas’s northern territory. Farnsworth Group worked with North Shore Gas to design an upgraded facility, requiring complete demolition of the existing station.

One of the challenges of this project was it’s location. The site is triangular shape bounded by railroad, narrow parkway strip between fenceline and Peterson Road, and a Kinder Morgan easement. In addition, this facility’s new construction happened during the COVID-19 Pandemic, with limited downtime for station construction as over 80% of the territory’s natural gas flows through this station (15.6 MMSCFH). The station also had limited maintenance capabilities without taking an outage or blocking in the station.

The new station was designed to provide redundancy, allowing for increased maintenance capabilities, reliability and safety. This was achieved through the components and EI&C design to handle remote or programmable input and control points, with local manual operation override capabilities.

A new electrical and control systems was designed to replace the outdated system. This included a new single phase 240VAC, 400-amp utility power drop that increased power to the station by 30KW. The utility drop fed power to a distribution power panel located in the new control room. The distribution panel supplied power to six buildings that sheltered meters, valves, remote telemetry units (RTU’s), Cummins standby generator with Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS)and an Eaton UPS system.

A new SCADA system was designed to replace the outdated control system and to bring the station up to the new Northshore Gas control strategy and standard. The new control system incorporated an Opto 22 SNAP process control panel to monitor and control the entire station. The Opto 22 system included discrete, analog and ethernet modules to interface with process instruments, gas chromatograph analyzers, and security cameras. The existing radio system was reused and interfaced seamlessly with the new Opto 22 system to communicate to the existing propane plant located approximately 1/4 mile east of the station.