Publications

Surface equipment facilities are assets which are installed to support oil and gas upstream operations in an area of oil and gas exploration in order to support oil and gas exploration activates, to facilitate well testing, oil and gas processing (separation) and storage and transportation. Normally multiple facilities that are sequentially linked (as a process relation) either directly or indirectly create dependencies. Although it is possible for a sub facility to be bypassed this can create the potential for decreased production. Consideration of the dependency relationship between facilities requires the proper Quantitative Assessment method in order to obtain the accurate measurement about the 'health' of any facility in order to ensure the successful sustainability of operations in order to achieve the Company Business Target (such as quantity and quality of product, safety constraints, environmental regulations, etc). This is possible to obtain by consistent application of procedures for operation, equipment readiness, and safety practices. In fact is is the unreliable equipment in a facility that might potentially impact production loss, un-predictable maintenance cost and exposure to unsafe conditions.On the score card target of maintenance and operation, the terminology of the 'health' of any facility us usually referred to as reliability and availability, both of these targets are quantitative targets which have a physical dependency based the on the dynamic condition of equipment and the interconnection with other equipment. The concept of Quantitative Assessment that is purposed in this paper, is established to develop a proper and logical relation among the all devices in any facility and dependency with its own related components.Most of the formulation is based on the qualitative approach with qualititative assessment of failure with time (e.g., total failure time within a month or cumulative down time within a month). Most existing methods for measurement (calculation) of reliability and availability are developed for a batch of related variables (event and failure) in a monthly period, this means that the variable(s) in the formulation is only limited for related events and or failures occurring in the monthly period. This can be improved since the proper assessment for reliability and availability (refer to IEC 62308) is treating it as a probabilistic (stochastic) event and relating it to a constant failure rate in a certain confidence interval. This means that the probabilities of failure have to be distributed as random events (not deterministic) but having a constant rate. And the failure is a continual event during time of operation instead of a discrete (batch) event during operation since the operation of the facility is a continual process as well. Regarding the safety issue, this paper will demonstrate the alternative method to optimize the safety assessment by means of the Markov Technique. Since the Separator Safety Protection System was designed as a single instrument (no redundancy), this might potentially cause an unsafe condition, such as oil spill out from separator in case failure to pump system. Therefore, the aim of this paper will be to propose to improve the assessment method by developing the simulator to obtain the calculation of RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Safety) by utilizing the MARKOV modeling technique and also utilizing sensitivity analysis in order to deliverthe proper parameter to optimize the maintainability factor. In this paper, the author uses a CVC Separator on an oil and gas production facility as the object of research. Upon successfully completing this research and development, this package could be desirable for use by a Reliability Engineer to enhance the following: To optimize the priority of a Reliability Improvement Program (SERIP program inChevron) based on justification by a quantitative assessment report; To optimize and improve the quality of parameters to maintainability for preventive and Predictive Maintenance activity by applying the optimal parameter (such as time effective, duration of maintenance period, PM Bill of Material, Man Power, Spare Part for inventory for critical equipment, PM Task List); To obtain the high quality standard for Quantitative Safety Assessment report as developed in order for obtain the proper safety protection devices as appropriate required on PFD (Probability of Failure on Demand), refer to IEC 62308 and IEC61508.