The global offshore industry can make strides in terms of improving its offshore asset integrity by placing an increased focus on predictive and preventative maintenance alongside more reliable data monitoring. By doing so, the potential to reduce unplanned downtime by 50% and opex by as much as 25% is realized.

Design for support

The starting point in the design of the asset and its facilities needs to be the consideration of the entire life cycle of the project. Taking the time at the outset to consider the changing conditions over the life of the field and then factoring this into the design will pay dividends in the long run. By having an understanding of fluid composition throughout the duration of the project, important decisions can be made at the concept stage when it comes to plant design and material selection.

Too often, facility design focuses primarily on the early stages of the project with limited regard for how changing conditions will necessitate altering assets further down the line. Such an oversight could lead to costly failures and the need for major and very expensive modifications at a later stage.

Integrating support into conceptual design was mandated by UK military aviation in 1991 and has paid dividends in improved reliability and maintenance and has increased operations and reduced support teams. All of this adds to reducing life cycle costs.

Improved maintenance data recording

Once the correct design has been implemented, it is equally important to establish a detailed maintenance program. The empirical data generated from regular recording is vital in terms of capturing an overall picture of the health of project-crucial equipment. Providing greater detail when recording maintenance logs, such as including details of the task performed, when it took place, and what was found, can considerably aid a project in the long term.

Lessons learned from the aviation industry

The application of a few lessons learned from the aviation industry by the offshore oil and gas industry can lead to more efficient management of assets.

Much offshore maintenance takes the form of a simple tick-box exercise and acknowledges that maintenance has taken place. However, by producing detailed maintenance records, companies start to build up a valuable set of empirical data that can then be analyzed. These practices and the data gathered not only allow for consistency across crew changes but also tell a story. They provide much greater insight into the overall health of the asset and will allow maintenance and reliability programs to evolve and increase efficiency. This is particularly evident in aviation, where detailed records provide a comprehensive history for the airworthiness of the aircraft and drive regular reliability and maintenance cycle reviews. Consequently, over the life of an aircraft type, support programs are optimized, with waste and inefficiency eradicated.

By taking support requirements into account at the earliest stages of a project, significant steps are taken toward improved asset integrity and life cycle cost improvements. Downtime can be dramatically reduced along with maintenance team sizes and subcontractor mobilizations. Likewise, warehouses full of spares, many of which will never be used, can be optimized with the potential for very large savings. Essentially, short-term investment reaps dividends in reduced long-term financial outlay.

Health monitoring systems

Health monitoring systems are readily available and represent another tool that can be added to the arsenal. Common examples include vibration analysis and thermography as well as oil and acoustic analysis. While these are capable systems in their own right, their value can be heightened by using them in a manner that allows for a more integrated approach. All assets have a wealth of performance monitoring systems to ensure production optimization. By integrating the performance and health monitoring data with the maintenance data, a more holistic view of the facility’s health can be determined and – more importantly – trended. In turn, this will lead to increased safety, more efficient production, and reduced costs.

Combining both health and performance data allows for greater equipment control and real-time trending. This enables operators to perform timely interventions by observing certain trigger points.

A practical example of this would be a trigger point caused by increasing vibration combined with performance tail-off and/or visible degradation. This is an indication that a piece of equipment is heading towards failure and would allow the asset management team to plan for required spares, manpower, specialist contractors, and the intervention point.

Many health monitoring systems are manpower-intensive. There is a definite gap in the marketplace for data to be transmitted externally, monitored remotely by experts, and fed back to clients. This real-time finger-on-the-pulse approach is one that aviation has been using to provide safe and reliable operations for many years. It is a tried and tested model that works very well.

Educating people

People are important to the process and should not be overlooked. They are a vital aspect when it comes to asset integrity. For this reason, educating individuals to adopt a change in thinking and develop this overall support philosophy presents a major challenge. Here, a cross-departmental understanding is essential as there must be synergy between design, operations and maintenance, and supply chain. Beyond this, each and every individual must understand the role they play in support of this.

This re-education program presents an opportunity to change habitual ways of working for the better. Practical and positive hands-on education is necessary to challenge traditional working practices in the industry. This change in management philosophy will not only streamline maintenance processes but also will improve safety and reliability while reducing personnel numbers and subcontractor support.

This integrated approach to thinking will lead to improved safety and a reduction in opex. The sector can achieve improved efficiencies by introducing regular reviews, performing timely and accurate interventions, and establishing an active education program.

While there are definitely strong examples of effective preventative and predictive maintenance programs within the sector, there is an enormous scope for improvement. We can all learn from those early adopters through building on and sharing best practices. By considering people, plant, and process and their role at each stage of the project life cycle, asset integrity can be markedly improved while leading to considerable savings.

For more than 20 years, aviation has been combining all of the above aspects to constantly evolve and optimize integrity while reducing costs. In both civil and military aviation, continual challenges to drive down costs have necessitated getting the most air miles for each dollar or pound spent while ensuring that airworthiness is not compromised. Consequently, that drive has stimulated substantial innovation in technology, design philosophies, and management systems to achieve that aim, and there is still scope to improve. With that in mind, there is enormous opportunity for the offshore industry to benchmark against aviation, adopt a similar approach, and generate comparable improvements in years to come.

There is enormous opportunity for the offshore industry to benchmark against aviation…