Nothing like a crisis to force people think and act differently. The concept for deployment of installed ultrasonic sensors to either replace or augment manual inspections to improve operational efficiencies and outcomes is by no means a newfangled idea. As with all technology, components get smaller and sensors become more deployable and affordable. The same with wireless UT sensors. Over the last decade the O&G industry has been marked by falling oil prices, reductions in new builds/expansions, declines in CAPEX budgets, and corporate reorganization in efforts to cut costs. Then COVID19 arrived, and the world changed in a matter of weeks. Instead of trying to cut costs, many refining and chemical plants shifted their thinking to working smart versus hard. This presentation will detail how wireless UT sensors combined with new ways of thinking has transformed the industry to save millions of dollars in asset integrity and operating efficiencies.
For decades, many asset owner/operators across the O&G value chain (and other critical industry segments) of upstream, midstream, & downstream have struggled to identify the root cause of fluctuating corrosion/erosion rates due to unreliable or infrequent data during various operating intervals on their most valuable of assets. This key missing data point has forced mechanical integrity teams, corrosion engineers, inspectors, and operations to, in many cases, make the best guess or hypothesize how to operate with a limited data set of information. In almost all cases, a time-based inspection or maintenance interval is used to gauge the useful lifetime of assets based on this limited data simply because these assets couldn't give their owners a real-time health diagnostic of how they were doing … until now. This paper will detail how COVID-19 offered a much needed reset button of opportunity for asset owners across many segments to rethink their decision making process by using technology to their favor. Many of these asset owners have now been able to take the next leap into strategic asset integrity planning by utilizing sensors and real-time data to not only safely and more efficiently operate assets but in some cases, achieve the financial holy grail of life-extension services for their most critical assets and components.
