Improving Safety of Deepwater Drilling Through Advanced Instrumentation, Diagnostics, and Automation for BOP Control Systems

摘要

Among the contributors to excessive downtime for deepwater drilling are undetected failures in blowoutrnpreventer (BOP) control systems. These undetected failures result from the limited instrumentation ofrncurrent systems, and require use of conservative criteria to decide if the BOP should be pulled to thernsurface for maintenance. The safety and risk effects of undetected failures are currently measurable onlyrnindirectly by the consequence of excessive non-productive time.rnA reliability- and human-centered design approach has been developed for next-generation BOPrncontrol systems to improve the safety of deepwater drilling by providing additional redundancy and faultrntolerance, more accurate information regarding control system health, and clear guidance for determiningrnwhether the control system should be reconfigured to compensate for failures or pulled to the surface forrnmaintenance. Enhanced instrumentation is provided to enable improved diagnostics and prognostics,rnmeasurable safety integrity levels, and reduced human errors in pullo pull decisions.rnThis approach has been applied to the development of advanced BOP control systems that includerninnovative design features to reduce downtime and enhance safety for deepwater drilling. The approachrnfocuses on development of advanced instrumentation and decision support for continuous assessment ofrnBOP health, assessment of compliance to regulatory and industry standards for BOP functions, automaticrnreconfiguration to compensate for component failures, and determination whether operations can continuernor if the BOP must be pulled for maintenance.