RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY AND MAINTAINABILITY ANALYSIS TO OPTIMIZE SEND OUT PRODUCTION ON GAS FLOATING UNITS

摘要

Over the last years Natural Gas has been posted as one of the most important fossil fuels of energy industry and the energy forecasting indicators have pointed that expansion in this sector will continue increasing significantly for the decades ahead. Therefore innovative offshore floating installations projects such as Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) and LNG Regasification units started to be conducted all over the world in order to enable the development of the offshore Natural Gas resources. Subsea field development, topside process and shipping components are one of the greatest challenges of these projects since profitability highly depends on reliability, availability and maintainability of these systems. In order to optimize Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) investment and to provide guidance for future Operational Expenditure (OPEX) allocations, Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) analyses are performed in order to identify possible causes of production losses and assess possible system alternatives. The results of a complete RAM analysis enable to maximize client return on investment and to advice on process design improvement in a cost effective manner. Thus, the investment to improve the safety in the installation can be justified and consequently a greater confidence in performing process and transfer operations in LNG offshore units is achieved by experts involved in LNG activities. RAM analysis initiates when a base case model is established. Based on the base case results, sensitivity cases can be used to really add value and do so cost effectively in a controlled manner prior to costly changes in design. Sensitivity cases analysis focuses on the production drivers and it aims at analyzing how the bottlenecks found in the base case can be managed in order to achieve operating targets through changes in maintainability and operability. Based on that and by using typical case study examples, this paper will focus on how to identify these production drivers as well as how they can be applied to optimize send out production on Gas Floating units.