This paper provides an overview of the Deepwater Integrity Assurance program being developed by Shell for ensuring integrity and reliability of deepwater facilities at minimum technical and commercial risks through a prognostic and holistic suite of tools and techniques. The strategy and workflow processes for design and implementation of the program are described with focus on four major areas shown in Figure 1:
1) Riser Integrity Assurance (RIA) - developing a toolkit to inspect and monitor critical components of risers during the operations phase and ultimately recommending the operational strategies to assure the riser system integrity is maintained cost effectively, operationally safe and reliably,
2) Floating Structure Integrity Assurance (FSIA) - developing intelligent prognostic health management systems to accurately predict deterioration levels and estimate remaining useful life of floating structures,
3) Ultralight Material Application (UMA) - facilitating deepwater development by utilizing and identifying right integrity management technology with high fidelity for lightweight materials, such as high strength steel and composite. A fundamental understanding is required for these 'materials of the future' to ensure appropriate design guidelines and a lifecycle integrity assurance,
4) Subsea System Integrity Assurance (SSIA) - developing a non-intrusive screening tool to enable continuous monitoring of wall thickness of subsea pipelines.
A long term outlook for the above main areas is maturation of the core technologies (see Figure 2) to achieve and maintain excellence in asset integrity through a systematic approach focusing on realizing 'Our assets are safe and we know it' and supporting extended life assessments for ageing facilities, whilst enabling less manning of offshore structures in the future. This will allow operators to assess the real time condition of their integrated deepwater production system and determine cost effective methods to maximize systems integrity.
The principles and experiences outlined in this paper will be of direct interest to professionals interested and engaged in improving both the safety and the performance of deepwater facilities for oil and gas production.
