Background

The chances of operational risks are high in energy sector , irrespective of whether you are offshore or onshore. The need to be sure of not letting our guards down, in times of hazard are highly dependent /reliable on different stage barriers. BOPs (Blow Out Preventers) are one such first stage barriers that ensures safe drilling operations against, uncontrolled surge of crude backing up the drill string and causing disaster.

In 2016, Shell wanted to improve the reliability of the subsea blowout preventers (BOPs) across its drilling operations. Sitting on top of wellheads on the ocean floor/onshore land, BOPs are the first line of defense. These complex systems of valves, which can be up to six stories high, are also the leading cause of non-productive downtime. Unplanned maintenance for a BOP can cost over a $1 million a day in lost revenue. Failure requires pulling the entire drill string — miles of it — from the ocean floor to the platform, costing millions in idle rig time. Earlier, Shell BOP reliability team faced the challenge to monitor its assets effectively as, crews used to gather performance indicators through manual daily reports that provided a piecemeal view of equipment health and usage. To detect failure, engineers had to wait for its early symptoms — a costly, reactive approach.

Solution

But, all this got solved strategically through deployment of digital BOP initiative using PI. Now, the operators or remote engineers can easily visualize from a suite of custom dashboards and PI Vision to monitor data like valve positions, wellbore pressure and temperature, alarm data etc., all in Realtime data . Thus, helping take steps to increase life span of equipment or avoid wrong procedures ensuring safe drilling operations.

In one such use case after a month of this digital initiative deployment, the team found an issue in the hydraulic system of one of BOPs, which was being pressured too frequently. The detection meant preventing an unplanned stack pull and saving over $5-7 million. Monitoring on DCS through remote desktop, a time consuming process.