Operational risk management: reliability analysis and proactive facility maintenance

Abstract

Unexpected cessation of production due to technical faults is the operator's true nightmare, especially if recovery operations require equipment that is not readily available or when operations can only be executed in certain annual seasons. Given these considerations, operators often face the nagging decision during the planning of a work-over operation: should a functioning component, which is known to be prone to breakdown, be replaced or should it be left in place and should operations continue until the part eventually fails. Pro-active replacement might allow the operator to fit the intervention into a larger planned operation and reduce, or eliminate, the risk that failure occurs at an undesired point in time. A North Sea operator was planning an operation in which a number of failed sub-sea oil pumps were going to be replaced and a decision had to be made whether some, or all, of the pumps that were still functioning should be replaced during the operation. A simple decision model was constructed that provided insight in the likelihood that failure of the running pumps would occur in the upcoming winter season and how much revenue potentially would be lost whilst waiting for the appropriate equipment to arrive. The model used historical pump failure data and accounted for different causes of pump failure.