Bits, Bytes, and Barrels: The Digital Transformation of Oil and Gas by Geoffrey Cann & Rachael Goydan

Author:Geoffrey Cann & Rachael Goydan [Cann, Geoffrey & Goydan, Rachael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781999514907
Google: bs7swAEACAAJ
Publisher: Geoffrey Cann
Published: 2019-01-07T23:00:00+00:00

Today’s Turnaround

Recently, I met with a senior planner for an oil and gas outfit whose role was to improve turnarounds at his company. This is a complex undertaking; the range of repairs and adjustments that are included in the typical turnaround can be overwhelming. Everything from fixing a broken handrail all the way to recycling catalyst in a processing unit is carefully planned out and scheduled during the year (or the years) ahead of the turnaround event in a plan that spans many thousands of steps. On turnaround day, leagues of contingent workers descend on the plant and await instructions to carry out their assigned tasks. Parts and equipment arrive in a steady stream to massive lay-down yards ahead of use. A fleet of rental equipment (power units, cranes, hoists) stands by awaiting job assignment. Scaffolding and temporary structures are quickly erected to enable work at height.

Plants are all different, preventing the replication of good turnaround practices from one plant to the next. Turnarounds are also infrequent affairs, perhaps an annual undertaking, and institutional memory of what worked and what didn’t fades particularly during times of high staff turnover. It can be hard to justify investing in improvements to turnarounds, when a turnaround might only last fifteen to twenty days.

Management, being mostly rational, recognizes that plants only make money when they’re running, and so the goal is to minimize the amount of time and cost it takes to carry out the turnaround. Managers are motivated to double- and triple-order the number of workers and pieces of rental kit to eliminate delays in getting work started and completed. Building a big on-site inventory of these resources is a costly way to do business when margins are tight, particularly where turnarounds are in remote, hard-to-reach places like Canada’s Far North oil sands or the North Sea offshore.

The costs of just about everything in a turnaround (people, time, regulatory compliance, equipment, emissions, energy, and consumables) have gone up, whereas the cost of digital has fallen to near zero. With so many computers on-site now, how might digital solutions be applied to the challenges of executing turnarounds?

It begins with having a solid understanding of the plant. If tags don’t match equipment, if equipment records are out of date, if diagrams don’t reflect actual installed equipment, then the plan is based on poor-quality data. It will be wrong from the very beginning. The biggest payoff from digital on a turnaround is to fix the data before the turnaround even starts.

The management tools and methods typically used for running turnarounds assume that the turnaround is like a project and not a process. Turnarounds show the kinds of cost and productivity improvements typical of projects, and not the more dramatic and impactful gains from the process-centric world of manufacturers. A manufacturer designs, implements, and refines the manufacturing process (say, an assembly line) to constantly remove waste and reduce cost. Turnarounds do feature some level of repetition (such as gate admissions and crew mobilization) that could leverage the kinds of tools we see in manufacturing.

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