3 minute read
Mika Tienhaara, CEO of ROCSOLE, on how to control production shutdowns and operational delays.
RUN-TO-FAILURE MAINTENANCE
Deblina Roy catches up with Mika Tienhaara, CEO of ROCSOLE, regarding the issue if production shutdowns and operational delays. Tienhaara also speaks about how ROCSOLE is providing solutions to reduce OPEX, avoid unplanned shutdowns and support automated, digitalised and unmanned platform operations.
Deblina Roy (DR): What are the main reasons for production shutdowns and delays for oil and gas operations these days?
Mika Tienhaara (MT): Unscheduled and unexpected production shutdowns, especially in processing plants, are costly and timeconsuming. Around 25% of US gulf coast shutdowns are planned, and 75% are unplanned, with a loss of close to US$650bn per year in unplanned equipment outages.
Why is this occurring? The run to failure is the critical issue. Globally, more than 60% of operating assets are aging. They have been in operations for 20 years or more. This makes operating and production conditions much more severe today. Also, these facilities have, for instance, water breakthrough, meaning a lot of water production compared to the oil production rate. This means such facilities also have to deal with sand and solids and all the contaminations carried from production fluids. These solids can cause erosion, corrosion and leakages, making it even more challenging for the facilities to make processing efficient to reach the production quality.
Therefore, reducing or altogether avoiding the risk of production shutdown means more oil; more oil means more revenue — millions and millions of dollars annually.
DR: In your opinion, how oil and gas companies can operate more efficiently and avoid lengthy shutdowns and costly maintenance?
MT: In North America, there were 340 active refineries in 2019. According to statistics, they had more than 2,000 unplanned shutdowns in a single year. To deal with this, it’s essential to enable operational efficiency measures, including predictive modeling. ROCSOLE’s solutions with sensors and digitalisation can help facilities with outdated equipment to improve the efficiency. ROCSOLE also helps automate the critical processes while creating robust base solutions.
The activities of oil and gas are quite carbon-emission intensive. With a documented increase of 10% inefficiency, you will reduce the total emission level by 4%. In oil and gas, there are fugitive emissions from malfunctioning equipment, leakages, etc. If you look at critical processing equipment like multiphase separators, the primary root cause of the failure is faulty instrumentation.
The oil and gas operators need to digitalise their systems to quantify and characterise solid deposits in piggable flow lines and pipelines. A digitalised system can maximise production throughput, optimise your pigging programme from the number of runs needed to the sizes used, detect blockages in the early phase to avoid significant costs caused by blockages, and improve the efficiency of integrity campaigns by identifying what deposits are present and where.
Image Credit: ROCSOLE
Mika Tienhaara is the CEO of ROCSOLE.
MT: The largest share of carbon emissions from oil and gas comes from scope 3, meaning the use of the products. It affects the users as we burn so much for fossil fuel. So we have to find other ways, for example, energy sources from renewable, etc. How to improve OPEX and operating efficiency? With AI & deep learning prediction solutions, we support operational teams to reduce OPEX, avoid unplanned shutdowns, and monitor product quality to increase revenues. Our field-proven applications include emulsion, deposition, sand, and flow regime-related imaging, and our services are applied on offshore and onshore pipelines, tanks, and separators. We aim to support automated, digitalised and unmanned platform operations.
