Lloyd's Register (LR) has appointed the industry-respected veteran, Steve Gilbert, to lead its ambitious asset management and decommissioning operations programme internationally for operators and manufacturers in the oil and gas sector. Steve will be based in Aberdeen and brings a wealth of experience to the job, having spent more than 25 years in the industry.
“Assessing the cost of late life asset management and decommissioning for operators in the UKCS and everywhere else in the world, is a real challenge. These costs are heavily influenced by the nature of the asset, the status of the global and local market, changes in technology, local regulation and many other inflationary pressures,” says Gilbert. “Making the right choice regarding decommissioning is a crucial decision.”
Gilbert highlights that a key issue for operators is deferral, concentrating resource and maintenance effort and spend where it is most required in order to minimise risk.
“If you take a typical offshore installation with an operational life of 30 years and approximately 50,000 maintainable equipment items, in the region of 750,000 work orders will be generated, leading to some 9,000,000 hours of activity. In total this can represent a cumulative expenditure of up to £2bn and, with many facilities exceeding their original design life, the costs of maintenance can continue accumulating significantly beyond what was originally anticipated.
“Determining the nature, timing and sequence of asset management, and ending the life of a field or facility in the most cost effective way, requires specialist knowledge of the reservoir, well design and production properties through to the drill package, processing equipment and vessel use. We have this unique capability in LR built up over many years from the investments we have made in companies such as ModuSpec, Scandpower, West Engineering and more recently Senergy to provide a high-level of engineering expertise across the oil and gas value chain including ship recycling and nuclear.”
LR’s aim is to create better understanding for industry of the minimum that needs to done to achieve a safe and robust asset management plan and a cost-effective decommissioning process.
“It is important that solutions are not over-engineered or over compensated for in costly, unnecessary remedial activity that has little to do with compliance to standards or processes.
“Significant effort is being focused on the oil and gas industry right now to help those companies that want to seek out maximum efficiencies to realise better value and better performance, especially around in-depth asset knowledge, residual value determination and decommissioning cost liabilities. This approach using our expertise can lead to cost savings that encourage future investment in older fields making it easier for companies to compete in the market. It is an exciting time of opportunity for industry and for LR' experts in this specialist area," says Gilbert.