Towards Implementing Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) Policy for Offshore Blowout Preventer (BOP) System

Abstract

With the steadily growing demand for energy in the world, oil and gas companies are finding themselves facing increasing capital and operating costs. To ensure the economic viability of investments and improve the safety of operations, oil and gas companies are promoting their asset integrity management (AIM) systems. In the past, the oil and gas industry adopted reactive maintenance regimes, which involved recertification, testing and repair of faulty equipment while trying to achieve minimum downtime. As technology becomes more affordable, operators have been able to carry out improved fault diagnosis, prognosis and maintenance optimisation. As a result of this, condition-based maintenance (CBM) is being adopted more and more as the preeminent maintenance regime for oil and gas equipment. The blowout preventer (BOP) is one of the most expensive and safety critical drilling equipment in the oil and gas industry. However, there have been very few studies and best practices about how to develop a CBM policy and what specific monitoring techniques and devices will be required to implement it for the BOP system. This paper proposes a V-model based architecture for designing a CBM policy in BOP systems. As a result of the model proposed, gaps in implementation are identified and all the hardware, software and training requirements for implementing the CBM solution in BOP systems will be outlined in detail. Our proposed CBM framework will help BOP operators and maintenance personnel make cost savings through less repairs and replacements and minimal downtime.