CATS saves oil company three week shut-down
Methods
CATS saves oil company three week shut-down
Keywords CATS, Gas,Maintenance, Oils, Ultrasonic
CATS International Ltd, of Southport, has recently helped the Bunduq Oil Company Ltd, of Abu Dhabi, to reduce an inspection and maintenance shut-down period from four weeks to one week and so minimise disruption of supplies to its customers in the Arabian Gulf.
Bunduq is a Japanese-owned company and operates just one platform in the Gulf. Part of the production process involves three-level seperation of the oil, gas and solids extracted. It had been proposed to carry out a shut-down of the platform over a four week period. This would involve the shut down, product disposal, purging, stripping and cleaning of a gas separator vessel to allow safe human access for internal visual assessment. This activity had been work-scoped for the whole of the whole of the shut-down period.
However, when one of Bunduq's major customers requested that supplies be disrupted for only one week instead of the projected four, Bunduq turned to CATS for assistance. Having calculated that all the tasks, apart from the separator vessel overhaul, were possible within the one-week window, they asked if it was possible to inspect the gas separator on-stream, prior to the shut-down. The results of this survey would then allow Bunduq's engineers to decide whether to take out the existing vessel and fit a new one within the shut-down or to recertify the vessel based on the inspection results.
Because of the imminence of the shut-down period, it was vital that the inspection was carried out without delay. Consequently, CATS mobilised an inspection team from the UK and within 48 hours were working on the platform. A comprehensive, on-stream,through-wall inspection was performed, using advanced digital, ultrasonic waveform capture, processing and imaging technology. This allowed a much more detailed assessment of the vessel condition and integrity to be performed than would have been possible using conventional methods. It established that there was no corrosion and the wall thicknesses had not deteriorated since the previous inspection.
As a result, it was deemed unnecessary to strip down the seperator, saving the costs of repair and maintenance and the possible capital cost of a new vessel. In addition, Bunduq's customer suffered no distruption to supply and Bunduq itself enjoyed an extra three weeks's revenue.
Details: CATS International Ltd, UK. Tel: +44(0) 1704 213311; Fax: +44 (0) 1704 25800.
