Investigation of condition based maintenance practice within Norwegian oil and gas

Abstract

The Oil and Gas industry’s increasing demands within risk management, cost efficiency, plant availability and the technology development have led to an increased interest for monitoring of equipment for performance and maintenance purposes. Today you have the possibility to monitor the condition and performance of almost every type of equipment. Characteristics of condition based maintenance are that many processes are involved, it includes many disciplines, it generates much information and it uses sophisticated computer and information technology. Increasing monitoring can therefore make maintenance operations and management more complex. Condition based maintenance has previously also suffered with implementation problems and conservatism towards it. Another challenge with monitoring is that it needs to be specified early in the project life cycle, limiting the time available for analysis. This thesis focuses on instrumented monitoring for maintenance purposes and condition based maintenance. The issues mentioned above and the many factors to account for, as opposed to other maintenance strategies, makes the task of determining and justifying appropriate condition monitoring for effective maintenance purposes, challenging. This thesis investigates, based on a survey targeting oil & gas companies, what challenges the companies experience and what their needs are in relation to condition based maintenance and condition monitoring. The objective is to see if increasing use of monitoring increases operational value and if increasing monitoring should be perused. The thesis also investigates a methodology used in an engineering contractor company as an example of how they treated the challenges on selecting CBM solutions. Standards on condition monitoring and condition based maintenance has been reviewed too see if they provide any useful information in solve the challenges. The survey indicates that the companies encourage increased use of monitoring and that they are not experiencing any major challenges that will limit monitoring. The companies are aware of most challenges and are currently working to solve them in order to use the monitoring for its potential. There are mainly two challenges that the companies are experiencing which are that many condition monitoring products are incompatible. The other is integration of condition monitoring systems with computer maintenance management system. The standards cover most parts of condition monitoring especially technical areas, but lack solutions on practical challenges with condition monitoring e.g. implementation. The thesis also shows that there is some variation on practice within condition monitoring in the oil & gas industry and gaps between standard recommendations, practice and operator needs.