How Critical Is Asset Performance Management for Oil and Gas Industry?

Energy prices have been dropping dramatically in the recent years and due to this a lot of pressure is coming upon the operating companies in the global oil and gas industry to maintain profitability. To tackle this huge challenge, the companies have to find ways to reduce costs without increasing any kind of risk related to unplanned downtime or employee and environment safety.

Asset Performance Management (APM) tools can save these companies a huge deal of money. APM tools and services are meant to increase effectiveness and efficiency of maintenance.

The following are some of its benefits:

• Reduce costs: It avoids costly unplanned downtimes and also minimizes the need for calendar-based scheduled downtime.
• Improve availability of assets
• Reduce operational risks

Companies like QuEST are already helping out their clients to better plan their maintenance by implementing condition-based maintenance or predictive maintenance instead of a reactive maintenance plan. But still, there are many companies in the upstream sector that go with reactive maintenance due to some constraints.

Asset Management in Oil & Gas Industry:

Downtime is a challenge: The Oil & Gas sector is a highly asset-intensive industry. New wells need to be regularly drilled and assets are installed in locations that are increasingly remote and typically hostile. Be it on land, offshore, or even deep-water, all the locations are remote and getting help and expertise is generally a problem. This results in a costly and pretty significant downtime in production and can lead to serious issues related to environment and safety.

Let’s plan for Maintenance: Most oil & gas companies have a scheduled maintenance plan in place to curb unplanned downtime. This is performed routinely in cycles according to a calendar-based timetable. This maintenance is done during planned maintenance outages and the non-critical assets are generally run to failure before maintenance. Therefore, critical assets have regular scheduled maintenance and non-critical ones have reactive maintenance.

But routine maintenance may not be the answer: As different assets have very different requirements of maintenance and different individual sites also have different operation processes, environmental conditions, etc. routine calendar based maintenance is generally unnecessary.

Too much Data…is always good? Various companies monitor large assets for faults and other problems related to pressure, temperature, etc. that can cause faults in the future. But, the problem isn’t the lack of software applications and data. It is too much data that is without context and many applications that are segregated and disparate. Most of the time is spent collecting this data and this creates a huge backlog. Sometimes, this data is thrown out as well.

Proper Data Analytics Help Improve Asset Management

The traditional way to do things was taking help from the in-house experts, but in today’s dynamic world this isn’t possible. Most in-house experts are on the verge of retiring, so without data and analysis, suboptimal performance is highly likely.

This modern approach of analysis and data collection helps companies in developing new techniques resulting in greater efficiency, less unplanned downtime, improved safety, less operational risk, better yields, and increased flexibility of production.

Proper and systematic data analysis tools like a common APM solution can help management make data-driven decisions from a source they can trust. This single APM source allows easy understanding of asset condition to both the management as well as the maintenance team. With the help of an APM solution, you can not only optimize your delivery, but also cut down on unnecessary scheduled maintenance as well as unplanned downtime. Here is how an Asset Performance Management program helps the Oil and Gas Industry:

1. It Helps the Management Make Investment Decisions: Management uses APM data to decide whether to add new assets or repair existing ones.
2. Reduces Unplanned Downtime: An APM is responsible for collectively analyzing all asset performance data and suggesting maintenance before the asset fails. This reduces any kind of unplanned downtime.
3. Saves a Lot of Money for the Company:With less maintenance schedules and condition-based maintenance, the life of the asset improves. There is less downtime and more productivity. Labor costs for maintenance are saved and costly maintenance costs during unplanned downtime is also saved.

Conclusion:

An Asset Performance Management program uses data driven analysis to inform the management and maintenance crews when and where a fault might occur. This saves a lot of manual effort and cuts down unnecessary spending as well. APMs are scalable and modular, which makes them the perfect fit for the future management of asset performance which could never be more important for oil & gas industry than in current times.