The SEAR JIP aims to reduce subsea equipment failures through collaboration and knowledge sharing. Led by Wood Group the JIP will contribute to improved subsea equipment design for offshore Australia, and other warm water environments, to avoid time consuming and costly interventions.
The offshore oil and gas industry in Australia is currently undergoing a major shift as a number of key projects move from the design and commissioning phase to the operating phase of their life-cycles. In addition, continued challenging market conditions mean that the oil and gas industry as a whole is investigating all avenues to reduce production costs.
The ability to better understand subsea equipment failure modes and intervention requirements has the potential to offer operators significant cost savings. From SEAR Phase 1 research, intervention costs were estimated at AUD 150 million for a small subset of existing infrastructure. When loss of production costs are factored in, improving equipment reliability has the potential to offer substantial OPEX savings over the lifetime of a field.
By developing a better understanding of subsea equipment reliability, short term solutions such as targeted risk based monitoring, inspection and maintenance strategies are possible to implement for subsea equipment. Rather than dealing with a failure reactively, it can be managed proactively.
The long term goal is to utilise lessons learned to feed information back to vendors; enabling equipment reliability issues to be designed out. Operational costs will be significantly reduced by:
- Reducing the frequency and duration of interventions and associated vessel costs;
- Reducing the requirement for purchasing new or refurbishing old equipment;
- Reducing the requirement for spares inventory and associated logistics costs;
- Maximising equipment reliability and availability and subsequent production uptime.
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