bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Fatigue Testing of Shrink-Fit Couplings for Joining High-Strength-Steel Riser Pipe
Authors: Carpenter Chris 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper OTC 24069, ’Fatigue Testing of Shrink-Fit Couplings for Joining High-Strength- Steel Riser Pipe,’ by J. Shield and J. Wightman, Subsea Riser Products; J. Pappas, RPSEA; and J. Bowman, Chevron, prepared for the 2013 Offshore Technology Conference, Houston, 6-9 May. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
The shrink-fit connection is a method of joining pipes to couplings or flanges by thermally expanding the coupling or flange over the pipe; sealing and static capacity are achieved by the contact pressure and friction between the components once they have cooled. This method enables the manufacture of high-pressure deepwater riser systems when traditional pipe-join methods are not feasible. A program was devised to test the manufacturability of shrink-fit joints made from high-strength (greater than 100 ksi) mill pipe and forged couplings.
Introduction
The objective of the project was to qualify the shrink-fit technology to project-ready status—any further testing on the connector would be for project qualification rather than further development. This development project involved two stages: (1) proving the feasibility of machining and assembly from seamless pipe and (2) hydrostatic and resonant fatigue testing of shrink-fit connections.
Six specimens were manufactured to demonstrate that pressure containment is maintained for maximum working pressures and hydrotest pressures, while target fatigue life is achievable without loss of pressure integrity in the connection. Before testing, a finite-element model was used to address residual shrink-fit stresses, safe hydrotest pressure, predicted connection-fatigue response, and the choice of internal pressure for fatigue testing.
Current Technology
The use of pipe for offshore oil and gas risers in various types and sizes requires intermediate connections because continuously cast pipe is not used for large-diameter offshore risers, and the pipe tends to come in limited lengths. For all drilling risers, the riser is usually required to be deployed and retrieved on a regular basis, so a coupling is employed on the joint extremities, which are designed for repeated assembly/disassembly. For shallow-water drilling risers, joint lengths of 40 ft are commonplace, but, for deepwater, larger joint lengths of up to 90 ft are increasingly desirable to reduce riser running time (and thus reduce drilling costs). These larger joints usually require one or more midjoint pipe connections.
The shrink-fit connection has al-ready been delivered for a full 19.25-in.-bore drilling-riser project for the North Sea. The benefits of this shrink fitting include a connection demonstrably stronger than the pipe. Also, very-high-strength material grades can be used. The problems with the technology include a lack of resonant-bending-fatigue data and a need for pipe that is produced to reasonable dimensional tolerances.
Company's Revised Approach to Safety Strives To Make Standards More Natural
Authors: Wilson Adam 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Editorial Manager Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 163757, ’A Hurt-Based Approach to Safety,’ by R.M. Smith, SPE, and M.L. Jones, ExxonMobil, prepared for the 2013 SPE Americas E&P Health, Safety, Security, and Environmental Conference, Galveston, Texas, 18-20 March. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
ExxonMobil has traditionally used industry standards driven by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to classify safety events on the basis of the treatment or restrictions provided. However, this treatment-based approach has limitations. With its focus on administrative reporting and incident-escalation management, the approach does not naturally resonate with workforce members to enable desired cultural changes. A hurt-based approach has been adopted to mitigate the limitations of the treatment-based approach.
Traditional Treatment-Based Approach
In the treatment-based approach to personnel safety, an incident, from the treatment or restrictions provided, is classified as a lost-time incident (LTI), restricted-work incident (RWI), medical-treatment incident (MTI), first aid, no treatment, near miss, or unsafe act/unsafe condition. These are usually represented by the traditional safety pyramid (Fig. 1). Benefits of this approach include
It provides historical metrics common across multiple industries.
It allows comparisons on a similar basis.
It is consistent with many government/regulatory-agency reporting requirements.
However, this approach also has significant limitations:
It is not consistently descriptive of actual injury severity; for example, body damage such as a minor laceration, a sprained ankle, or a broken neck could each be correctly classified as an LTI, depending on the circumstances.
It does not have an integral potential injury severity; safety events with low actual consequence (e.g., minor hurt, near misses) are often overlooked or simply not reported.
It creates a blind spot relative to exposures for severe injuries by focusing solely on traditional safety metrics [e.g., total recordable incident rate (TRIR), LTI rate (LTIR)]; certain activities and activities managed by safety controls require greater exposure awareness.
It is not an enabler for a culture of caring; workers can perceive case-management priority to be about reducing the number of recordables (perhaps by minimizing treatment) and not about the elimination of all injuries.
Safety-Management Leading Indicator Results in Unintended Consequences
Authors: Wilson Adam 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Editorial Manager Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 164961, ’Unintended Consequences of a Promising Safety-Management Leading Indicator,’ by Carl D. Veley, SPE, vMBA Consultants, prepared for the 2013 SPE European HSE Conference and Exhibition, London, 16-18 April. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
A metric based on a corrective-action-classification system initially appeared to be a valuable leading indicator for management purposes. However, after trial applications, it became clear that, when this metric was used to define performance goals, it had unanticipated consequences that cumulatively and insidiously caused more damage than the accidents it was intended to prevent. Category matching is an upgrade of that original metric and eliminates harmful unintended consequences of corrective-action classifications used alone.
Background
Trailing indicators are by far the most common type of safety statistic. Governments, insurance companies, corporations, and essentially everyone who tracks accidents will record the number and type of injuries, plus the money spent on repairs, machinery replacements, wasted time, or other harmful consequences of accidents. Leading indicators are complicated by the fact that some dangerous acts (e.g., touching high-voltage switchgear) will always produce an accident with severe consequences while other dangerous acts (e.g., running a stop sign) might be repeated hundreds of times without causing an accident. In industrial work situations, no scientifically defensible equation exists where X dangerous acts produce Y accidents with Z fatalities.
As shown in Fig. 1, accidents come in packages with four components. In reverse chronological order, they are (1) consequences, meaning harm (either injury or damage); (2) the accident itself, an unplanned event; (3) an act of people, not intended to produce the accident; and (4) the reason the accident was not anticipated. A broken leg is never an accident. It is an injury and the consequence of an accident. An accident is an unplanned event, and a fall is always an accident regardless of whether it causes injury. The vast majority of accidents cause little or no harm, but confusing an accident with its consequences is a major obstacle to preventing accidents because the target of corrective actions is not clear.
Experiments on Large-Scale Fires Reveal Benefit of Greater Water Deluge
Authors: Wilson Adam 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Editorial Manager Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 164973, ’The Effect of Deluge Spray Systems on Large-Scale Fires,’ by Stian Hoiset and Eli Glittum, Statoil, prepared for the 2013 SPE European HSE Conference and Exhibition, London, 16-18 April. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
A series of 56 large-scale fire experiments in the range of 40–120 MW has been carried out in a generic offshore module. The effect of deluge fire-water application has been measured for different setups. Both deluge nozzle type and water-application rate have been varied in the experiments.
Introduction
The use of water-spray systems for fire-fighting is standard for most offshore oil and gas installations. The requirements to and guidelines for control and mitigation of fires are stated in International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 13702, Petroleum and Natural Gas Industries—Control and Mitigation of Fires and Explosions on Offshore Production Installations—Requirements and Guidelines. Appendix C in ISO 13702 lists the recommended fire-water-application rates for areas and rooms on an oil- or gas-production installation. Typically, the minimum recommended water-application rate is listed as 10 (L/min)/m. NORSOK Standard S-001, applicable for installations on the Norwegian continental shelf, states that the effect of deluge may be taken into account for process equipment and piping, provided that there is proper documentation of the fire-water effect (and that there are requirements to the reliability of the fire-water system).
In order to document the effect of the recommended fire-water-application rate, a set of full-scale fire experiments with application of fire water was carried out at SINTEF NBL.
Background
Today’s design of oil- or gas-production installations includes deluge-fire-water systems as standard. These are costly and may require extensive maintenance. Despite the costs involved, little knowledge is available on the actual effect of fire-water systems under different operating conditions.
Appendix C in ISO 13702 recommends a typical water-application rate of 10 (L/min)/m. National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 15: Standard for Water Spray Fixed Systems for Fire Protection recommends a design objective for control of burning of not less than 20 (L/min)/m. NORSOK S-001 refers to NFPA 15 but prescribes 10 (L/min)/m for process areas and equipment surfaces and 20 (L/min)/m for the wellhead area. American Petroleum Institute (API) 2030, Guidelines for Application of Water Spray Systems for Fire Protection in the Petroleum Industry, prescribes 20 (L/min)/m where pumps are present and 10 (L/min)/m for pipe racks and piping. To what extent do these water-application rates actually affect the fire?
Legislation, Commerce, and Ethics Drive Design of Quieter Facilities in Australia
Authors: Wilson Adam 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Editorial Manager Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 156732, ’Why Quiet? Legislative, Commercial, and Ethical Drivers Behind the Design of Quieter Offshore Facilities in Australia,’ by Andrew Chandran, Chevron Australia, prepared for the 2012 SPE/APPEA International Conference on Health, Safety, and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, Perth, Australia, 11-13 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
Legislation, economics, and ethics are major drivers behind the adoption of engineering noise controls during offshore-facility design in Australia. The global challenge facing noise advisers is to understand how these factors influence the adoption of engineering noise controls and to work closely with project teams to ensure that operational-noise risk is as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP). Implementing these controls during the front-end engineering and design (FEED) can ultimately protect a company and its workforce during facility operation and can turn major capital projects (MCPs) into valued legacy operations.
Introduction
It is commonly said that “health and safety are good for business” without seeing substantiated claims. However, if health and safety truly are good for business, it should be demonstrably so. This may involve an evaluation of the costs vs. benefits of each health and safety initiative, as well as the feasibility of implementing them. One such initiative is hearing preservation.
Cost/benefit analysis (CBA) is an important tool that can be used to com-pare the net economic worth of various health and safety initiatives to deter-mine how best to allocate finite project resources to maximize a project’s value. Various international cost/benefit models exist to help companies perform economic evaluations of health and safety initiatives. An Australian ALARP model recently used by Chevron Australia during the design of an offshore production facility in the North West Shelf of Western Australia is one of them.
Additionally, discounted-cash-flow (DCF) analysis is introduced as a means of supplementing conventional CBA to help decision makers determine when, during the lifetime of a project, engineering noise controls should be implemented to maximize a project’s net present value (NPV).
The decision to implement effective engineering noise controls is not based solely on economics, but it is a major driver behind the selection and implementation of proposals that can affect a company’s bottom line. Other key drivers are legislation and business ethics or cultural expectations.
Comments: Reader Feedback (August 2014)
Authors: Donnelly John 
Published: February 2015

Editor's column
Every year, JPT surveys its readership to help determine future coverage and to ensure that it is fulfilling its mission. Along with other important SPE programs such as meetings, workshops, training programs, and other services, one of JPT’s major roles is to help SPE provide high-quality technical information to members and to the industry at large.
The emailed survey was sent to a representative sample that took into account the respondent’s company type, geographical location, age, and industry experience. A little more than a third of respondents classified themselves as engineers, with the next highest category managers at 20%. Approximately 42% of respondents reside in North America and 59% of them reported having at least 10 years of experience in the oil and gas industry.
Looking at the survey results, three-fourths of survey respondents rate JPT as “very good” or “excellent,” in line with survey findings of the past 2 years, and 96% of respondents ranked it as good to excellent. Of the various standing features in each issue of the magazine, the most read were Technology Update, articles describing how new technologies are being used in the field; summaries of selected SPE technical papers spanning 47 technical categories over the course of the year; staff-written feature articles about emerging technologies; and Technology Applications, short articles about newly commercialized technologies.
The synopses of technical papers presented at SPE conferences are selected by the 48-person JPT Editorial Committee as the best or most interesting in that particular category. The technical categories that attract the most reader interest are hydraulic fracturing, unconventional resources, reservoir performance and modeling, and field development projects. Also ranking high were mature fields and well revitalization, production operations, high-pressure/high-temperature challenges, completions, and horizontal and complex-trajectory wells.
Other Findings
Compared with other magazines serving the E&P industry, 80% of survey respondents rank JPT better or significantly better, slightly higher than the response to the same question in the 2013 survey. Although several respondents complained about the number of advertising pages in the magazine, others said they ranked JPT higher than other publications because it is less commercial and contains better and more reliable industry content. Other readers noted JPT’s relationship with SPE as the reason they consider the magazine more trustworthy and industry-relevant.
Among other findings in the survey: 90% of respondents find JPT somewhat or very useful to them in their jobs, and JPT is most read in print compared with other publishing platforms. Internet access ranks second, followed by tablet and smartphone app. JPT’s Editorial Committee and SPE staff will use the information in the survey to further improve the magazine and to ensure that it remains useful and relevant to its readers. JPT
Program Ranks Musculoskeletal Risk of Operating Valves in Process Industries
Authors: Wilson Adam 
Published: February 2015

This article, written by Special Publications Editor Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 165690, ’A Method for Ranking the Musculoskeletal Risk of Operating Valves in Process Industries,’ by Dennis A. Attwood, Human Factors Applications, and Alicia T. Tys, Marathon, prepared for the 2013 SPE Eastern Regional Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 20-22 August. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
Every process plant presents a high number and diversity of valves that control the flow of feedstock, products, and service liquids and gases. A comprehensive program was developed for a major US refinery to assess the musculoskeletal risk associated with manually operated valves then to rank each valve according to the risk each poses to plant operators and maintenance technicians. Valve repair and replacement is expensive, so the cost-effective approach was to assess only those valves that are critical to plant operation.
Introduction
Process plants contain a large number of process valves with a wide diversity of designs that control the flow of a wide range of fluids. The ergonomic issues associated with the design, operation, and maintenance of valves include
Physical stress to open and close them
Potential for injuries and subsequent related costs
Lack of access to process-critical valves
Difficulty of removing and replacing them
Potential for process upsets when valves cannot be operated in the time required
As a result of injuries suffered while operating valves, a major US petroleum-refinery company initiated a program to identify high-risk valves and to modify them to reduce the operating risk of injury.
A model, illustrated in Fig. 1, was developed to create a systematic approach to identify the valve issues in a process plant, analyze the issues, prioritize the valves that need attention, implement a solution, and measure the results. The approach can be modified to reflect the unique character of the plant that implements the program.
The objectives of the study were to
Develop a valve-risk-assessment program unique to the process plant based on the plant’s human-factors engineering-design standards and the valve-assessment model.
Assist site personnel in identifying the process-significant valves and surveying them to determine the top candidates for repair or replacement.
Technology Focus: Reservoir Performance and Modeling (September 2010)
Authors: Vikane Erik 
Published: February 2015

Technology Focus
Understanding and management of subsurface uncertainties are crucial for successful development of early-phase projects. The development solution, drive mechanism, processing capacities, and number of slots needed all affect the net present value and the capital and operating expenses. Planning and execution of early-phase data acquisition and the effect these data have on late-life economics are a theme that deserves more attention. Concept selection is the most important part of an early-phase development from a subsurface point of view. Because of the high well cost, deepwater projects are sanctioned with few appraisal wells and limited dynamic information. The importance of an overall strategy to manage subsurface uncertainties is described in the paper regarding the development of the greater Plutonio area.
Dynamic information, both horizontal and vertical permeability, is always on top of every reservoir engineer’s wish list. Wireline formation testing is a cost-effective way of addressing dynamic information, keeping in mind that an extended well test or a drillstem test is not always feasible for economic or practical purposes.
Determination of remaining oil is key to increased oil recovery. A proactive approach to surveillance gives insight into the reservoir and has potential to mitigate unpleasant surprises. The paper describing the proactive well and reservoir management and the paper assessing fluid migration and quantifying remaining-oil saturation are both excellent examples of creating value through systematic reservoir surveillance.
Reservoir Performance and Monitoring additional reading available at OnePetro: www.onepetro.org
IPTC 13640 • “Successful Reservoir Monitoring With 4D Microgravity at Ras Laffan, State of Qatar” by A.F. AhmadZamri, SPE, RasGas Company, et al.
IPTC 13185 • “Reservoir Modeling and Production Evaluation in Shale-Gas Reservoirs” by C.L. Cipolla, SPE, Carbo Ceramics, et al.
SPE 127858 • “Perdido: The First Smart Field in the Western Hemisphere” by Robert K. Perrons, SPE, Shell.
SPE 128137 • “Integrated-Production-Model Calibration Applied to a Gulf of Mexico Subsea Field” by L. Saputelli, SPE, Hess Corporation, et al.