Quantifying the Added Value of Adopting Condition Monitoring to Subsea Blowout Preventer (BOP)

As the technology for fault detection, diagnosis and prognosis has become increasingly affordable over time, offshore oil and gas industries have adopted condition-based maintenance (CBM) over corrective and time-based maintenance as their preeminent maintenance regime for safety instrumented assets. This has made determining the economic added value of CBM strategy very crucial for organizations. This paper presents a framework to perform an economic feasibility analysis of implementing CBM in subsea oil and gas production systems, with a particular focus on blowout preventers (BOPs). Though the BOP is one of the most important safety-critical drilling equipment in the oil and gas sector, to the best of our knowledge there is no study examining the economic added value of CBM strategy. Our methodology takes into account both the costs associated with CBM implementation (including acquisition, installation, and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs) as well as the benefits which are accrued from implementing CBM (such as increased revenue and reduced repair costs). An accurate and robust cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is performed for the adoption of CBM in BOPs and some metrics such as net present value (NPV) and cost-benefit ratio (CBR) are calculated. The proposed approach in this study will provide asset managers and maintenance professionals with a key decision-making tool with which to make an informed financial case for implementing CBM.