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Oil and gas production fields are facing natural decrease in production due to maturation of wells and ageing of production facilities. RAM studies enable users to maximise production and optimise operations for further growth. One of the biggest challenges of the oil and gas industry is the development and implementation of new technologies to enhance recovery from mature fields and extend the life of ageing facilities. Asset owners seek more effective methods for managing their existing assets and future developments, increasing performance and reducing costs. However, how does one quantify the performance optimisation gained by the application of these methods and from the implementation of new technologies on a mature asset?
RAM analysis
A proven methodology named Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) analysis is the answer. Through RAM analysis it is possible to analyse and improve the production efficiency of assets, safely and responsibly. The first step to evaluating opportunities for production optimisation on a mature asset is building a detailed model that covers the design of the facility, the operational procedures and maintenance strategies. The outputs for the study will: Provide a quantitative picture of the assets performance over its remaining life Identify critical equipment and systems, providing focus to improve the assets performance Quantify the impact and/or threats from potential investments The analysis will: Give you a better understanding of performance behaviour, describing pertinent parameters such as produced volume, availability, maintenance, resource use and operational constraints Identify which areas require focus on performance improvement initiatives Rank initiatives based upon the greatest return on investment
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Improve performance safely and responsibly Give a full picture of annual production efficiency over the assets life
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Modelling considerations
Flow Profile
The ability to model the well deployment over the life of the system has a significant effect to the performance of a system and it must be accounted for to get a complete picture of performance. With a flow calculation method, the analyst is able to go beyond normal measure of availability and, instead of giving only an Availability result (system uptime), you can produce an estimated production efficiency. By modelling the flow through the systems, the study takes into account degraded failures (partial loss of production) and other Operability factors which is not possible in traditional RAM Analysis. Degraded failure may account for a huge amount of losses. Hence, rather than just providing rudimentary uptime vs downtime information, production efficiency keeps track of how much production losses are throughout the system life, and quantifies the efficiency by dividing the actual production by the potential production. Combined with time varying flow from multiple sources, this result becomes a very powerful metric. The expected flow of oil from each well is 12,000 bbls per day.
Events
In oil and gas developments, events can be separated mainly into three categories: unscheduled, scheduled and conditional. These three basic events are defined below: Unscheduled events are unplanned and occur at random. However, their occurrence usually corresponds to a particular statistical distribution. Example: equipment failures Scheduled events where the occurrence is known. Example: routine inspection Conditional events that are initiated by the occurrence of other events via a Boolean logic expression. Example: warm-up of equipment in standby
For example, the NUI has two of the three events defined under its system. One unit might comprise of only equipment failures, planned maintenance or conditional element or even a combination of these three. The model is set up based on the Reliability Block Diagram (RBD) which will at times appear to be different from the actual process flow diagram (PFD) simply because RBD is built with focus on how the reliability of one system affects another system. RBDs are used to outline the logical relationships between the different events, equipment and systems. The level of detail in these diagrams allows identification of relative equipment capacities and areas of operational redundancy.
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Each unit will comprise its own reliability data for example, the data extracted from the separation system is shown as follows: Equipment Production Separator Failure mode Spurious Trip Unknown but critical Overhaul Spurious Trip Incipient Overhaul External Leakage Critical Other Failure distribution Normal Normal Expected Value 4.5 6.2 Standard Deviation 1.1 1.6 Repair distribution Triangular Triangular Minimum Time 0.5 1 Most Likely TTR (time to failure) 1.5 1.7 Maximum time 9 4.4
Test Separator
19 9 4.4 19 20 20 10
Production Cooler
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Financial data
If the analyst has access to the values of capital expenditure, operational expenditure (cost for spare parts, manhours, etc.) and product pricing (selling oil and gas, for example) a RAM study can be used to calculate the net present value (NPV) for each design possibility. Calculation must take into account multiple products pricing which could be variable during the lifecycle.
Based on the subsystem criticality (Figure 4), the most critical system is the seawater system, which is responsible for 38.309% of the losses.
Drilling into more detail, one level below the seawater system, the lift pump is shown as the most critical system, representing 36.5% of the 38.3% of losses. The lift pump, as part of the seawater system, can be drilled-down into even further details. The economic analysis gives the NPV of the project, and is summarised. In this case, there is a loss of $91 million throughout the life of the system.
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Conclusion
The typical key results from a RAM study include a better understanding of system performance and criticality.
System performance
Performing a sensitivity analysis allowed us to predict the production efficiency for different design options: Base Case Definition Predicted production efficiency Model presenting design option 94.03% the first Sensitivity case 1 Base case with improve component availability 95.69%
Not only providing the user with the performance (production efficiency) of the asset, the analysis can provide one step further analysis into the cost benefit analysis of the possible investment project. In this case, by looking at the sensitivity case 1, the investment is likely to be viable. Cost of adding 1 lift pump $2.5 Million 1.1 Additional revenue $21.1 Million Verdict Viable
Criticality and key problem areas A list of the most critical equipment and systems is produced by the end of the analysis The seawater system represents 38.31% of all the losses registered for the base case The maintenance campaign represents 20.42% of all the losses registered for the base case Host platform trips represent 14.96% of all the losses registered for the base case
A large set of variables could be changed aiming at a better design and performance, effective maintenance operations and reduction of operational constraints. A RAM study will support decision-making that will optimise productions at facilities in a safe and responsible way. Only a software package makes it possible to efficiently take into account all these key parameters.