Enhanced Technology Qualification: A Reliable Path When Facing Changing Conditions and Demands

Abstract

Historically, successful introduction of new technologies in the offshore oil and gas industry has been based on different strategies. With support from the industry DNV formulated a Recommended Practice (RP) that defined systematics for Qualification of New Technology in 2001. Today, it has earned the reputation of an accepted industry practice.Experience gained from 10 years of industry use has been implemented in an updated RP. The main improvements relate to:1) Qualification process alignment with business needs.2) Adaptation to technology development challenges.2) Facilitation of rapid improvement cycles based on preceding versions of the same technology.3) Use of modern methods within systems engineering and dependability. Two industry examples illustrate how the improvements apply to the users of the updated DNV-RP-A203: 1) Fiber rope technology.2) Qualification of a new cold-repair technology for offshore units.