Abstract
The world is facing a new reality when it comes to sustainability. All major oil and gas companies around the world are being pushed to operate their facilities, upstream, midstream or downstream, with the minimum amount of waste and hazardous emissions. The “green processes”, as the industry calls them, are not the exception anymore but the standard.
RAM analysis provides key parameters to guarantee a sustainable process. The equation is quite simple: more reliable processes use less feed products, reduce the size of storage and deliver the same amount of end-product.
A good example of how applying reliability methods can guarantee a sustainable process is carrying out a RAM study at an upstream asset. By replicating the design configuration and operational procedures of the platform in a virtual model, the analyst gets a complete picture of the performance including production rates of oil, gas and water, the critical systems and equipment leading to the major losses as well as the effectiveness of the maintenance strategy. Supplied with this information, optimisation and reduction of downtime can be easily performed by running sensitivities analysis. Finally, suggestions in regards to design configuration, different maintenance strategies and de-bottlenecking of the platform are defined considering implementation cost and return on investment (ROI). Traditional RAM analysis for the oil and gas industry should be able to cover all these scenarios (Calixto, 2016).
Many companies are evaluating the benefits of RAM analysis during the operational stage. One of possible application is to understand the environment impact of a specific design configuration or operational procedure.
DNV GL has developed a software tool that integrates Sustainability aspects into the traditional Reliability, Availability and Maintainability analysis. This approach, namely RAM2S (Alvarenga, 2009), helps to overcome the lack of quantitative numbers to support many potential engineering solutions to account and thus reduce or even avoid methane, CO2 or any GHG emissions. Superficial assessments might have been crucial to avoid sustainable and safer solutions being implement or further developed. This integrated approach, for instance, will allow natural gas industries to find more cost-effective alternatives to align even more their business towards global warming reality, overcoming or minimizing the inherent green-house gas emissions. This paper presents a case study where RAM analysis is implemented to evaluate the impact of flaring operations to the environment and its impact on the asset performance.
