Offshore staff
HØVIK, Norway – The maintenance of BOPs has significant financial, logistical, and safety implications for drilling operators and rig owners. DNV GL has established a joint industry project (JIP) to develop a risk-based maintenance plan to deliver more effective and cost-efficient BOP maintenance. Several BOP manufacturers, operators, rig owners, and shelf state regulators have joined the JIP, and others may still come on board.
BOPs traditionally are subject to time-based maintenance that can create critical challenges, such as unstructured maintenance management, reduced reliability, and equipment overhauls, which may lead to increased operational downtime.
“A risk-based maintenance approach aims to mitigate these issues,” says Rui Quadrado, project manager at DNV GL Oil & Gas. “Benefits include increased safety and operability by improving BOP performance, the introduction of lifecycle design input and increased maintainability. Ultimately, this should deliver optimal maintenance planning, thereby reducing costs.”
Current regulation proposes the use of alternatives to time-based maintenance. The Petroleum Safety Authority of Norway, in particular, is focused on the drilling operators’ maintenance functions, and this has increased industry interest in risk-based maintenance.
“This JIP is looking to put this knowledge into action and provide a recommended practice or international standard in which effective maintenance tasks will be identified and a cost-benefit analysis of these tasks will be evaluated,” Quadrado adds. “Our experience and collaborative approach to technical challenges have already demonstrated that risk-based maintenance (through FMECA and RCM analysis) can be successfully implemented on subsea BOPs.”
The work will be conducted by DNV GL and supervised by a steering committee. Industry partners are welcome to attend a kickoff meeting that will take place on Sept. 25 inNorway.
08/27/2014
