JIP Drives New Ways of Managing Integrity of Floating Oil and Gas Assets
Authors: Feder Judy 
Published: May 2021

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Judy Feder, contains highlights of paper OTC 30425, “Innovative Asset-Integrity Management To Drive Operational Effectiveness,” by Danny Constantinis and Peter Davies, EM&I, prepared for the 2020 Offshore Technology Conference Asia, originally scheduled to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 17–19 August. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Copyright 2020 Offshore Technology Conference. Reproduced by permission.

While the focus on the growing floating gas industry is firmly on output, the industry needs to ensure safety, compliance, and profitability of high-value, complex, floating gas assets, some of which operate close to high population densities. Effective asset-integrity programs are a key part of such an effort, and it is widely agreed that better use of data and robotics will help reduce unnecessary work and human risk. The complete paper describes a joint industry approach for addressing asset-integrity management challenges that has proved successful for floating production, storage, and offloading vessels (FPSOs).

Introduction

Managing the integrity of offshore, near-shore, and berthed floating oil and gas assets faces numerous challenges, including the following:

- Long service lives

- The need to cut operating costs

- Varying asset-integrity requirements of marine and process equipment

- Growing global demand for gas

- Increasing requirement to drive down carbon emissions

- The need for enhanced sustainability

Traditional cost-reduction strategies of prior lean market periods are no longer accepted by the industry, which the authors say needs to implement permanent cost reductions, increased sustainability and efficiency, and improved safety. These can be achieved only by new ways of managing asset integrity, targeted at consistent low price and efficiencies and developed, supported, and accepted by all sectors of the industry.

Role of the Joint Industry Project (JIP)

The Hull Inspection Techniques and Strategy (HITS) JIP has encouraged such innovations. The complete paper describes new methods facilitated by HITS that include diverless inspections of hulls and mooring systems and remote, unmanned methods of inspecting confined spaces such as cargo and water ballast tanks.

Organizations such as the HITS JIP, whose membership includes oil majors, service providers, classification societies, and regulators, and the FPSO Research Forum, of which HITS is a part, have helped define the direction for improvements in inspecting, maintaining, and repairing floating production assets. These organizations have encouraged the development of new technologies that have improved safety and reduced operational costs. According to the paper’s authors, this direction has also shaped the drilling sector, can do the same for floating liquified natural gas (FLNG) and floating storage and regasification units (FSRU), and could potentially expand into floating renewable-energy-production assets. These and similar concepts are now being taken forward in a floating gas (FloGas) JIP.