Page 50: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Jul/Aug 2019)

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OPINION Avoiding Obsolescence

Smart subsea strategies avoid obsolete equipment risks

Iain Smith, President, Subsea Controls, Proserv n the oil and gas industry, cold, hard data greatly in- shutdown period when the replacement can be installed.

forms an upstream operator when it looks to predict the When the oil price is sky high, then spending $20 million future direction of the market and chart the course of its on a full upgrade because a couple of relatively minor parts

I business strategy. have failed, might be easier to swallow, but it still doesn’t

A substantial rise in the price of oil might mean previously make commercial sense if such an outlay is being committed shelved, investment intensive projects are dusted off and reig- when there are clear alternatives available.

nited. A spike in the price of other commodities, such as steel or aluminum, could mean original equipment manufacturers Opting for coexistence (OEM) will bump up the prices of manifolds or subsea trees, As the industry has steadily risen from the nadir of the thus impacting cost projections. downturn in 2016, the “lower for longer” philosophy around

But some key benchmarks are harder to quantify. Reliabili- oil prices is still very much on the boardroom table when it ty of equipment is not so easy to measure but it is nonetheless comes to corporate strategy. It is surely counterintuitive for essential, no matter where that operator is pumping oil or gas. an operator to seek to extend the life of assets and ramp up

In the harsh, often challenging environments encountered in ef? ciencies when it is missing a big trick regarding resolving the subsea segment, shutdowns and failures are a particularly the issue of obsolete control systems.

major headache and are not easily recti? ed. The subsea product development strategy at Proserv is attuned to addressing the inherent obsolescence challenges

The obsolescence factor faced by operators, by providing technology solutions that

The risk of equipment becoming obsolete is a perennial actually coexist with the OEM’s original control system.

problem, which impacts the reliability of subsea control sys- Our Augmented Controls Technology (ACT), for instance, tems. The common scenario is that an operator will acquire enables additional technologies, such as ? ow meters, to be a system from an OEM and then utilize it, with no major deployed to support, or ‘augment’, any existing control sys- hassles, for a period of time. tem, removing or replacing defective components as required.

But invariably, sometimes as soon as ? ve years after de- So, this effectively means a full system upgrade, and its hefty ployment, the system will begin to falter as components break associated costs and time implications, can be avoided.

down and gradually the reliability of the operation will be At a time of ongoing capex caution, a feasible alternative increasingly compromised. In our experience, the one piece option to committing tens of millions of dollars towards ma- of kit that so often seems to be the root of the failure – is the jor upgrades could transform a business plan.

electronics in the control system itself.

Faced with regular outages, the operator will naturally turn Making commercial sense again to the OEM and seek new circuit boards to replace the Over and above the cost bene? ts, there are additional gains broken parts, only to ? nd the latest generation of the control from preferring a coexistence approach to the replacement of system no longer co-exists with the previous technology and a whole control system.

the desired hardware simply isn’t available. Presently, an operator that can see further potential in a

Typically, when a control system develops regular failures ? eld, and who may want to add a couple of new tiebacks to and the supplier cannot offer tangible support, an operator it, might be constrained by the misguided belief its unreli- feels compelled to upgrade everything – adding to capital able and ageing controls system would have to be completely expenditure (capex) and requiring a convenient production replaced in order to undertake the expansion – and so access 50 OFFSHORE ENGINEER OEDIGITAL.COM