Could integration lead to better subsea integrity management?

Loss of subsea asset integrity risks environmental and reputational damage for operators. It may jeopardise safety, cause costly deferred or lost production, and require complex remedial work. Consequently, ensuring integrity through a reliable inspection, repair and maintenance (IRM) process is essential, but not always easy when managing multiple service providers. 

Are you managing multiple interfaces? 

Ensuring effective interfaces between IRM contractors is critical. Service providers must work seamlessly with you and each other to ensure that critical infrastructure remains serviceable. For example, inspection data captured by one contractor must be shared so that integrity threats are not overlooked and appropriate repair and maintenance activities can be designed and delivered by other contractors. 

For critical supporting infrastructure, several specialist contractors may collect the data needed to inform mitigation and remediation strategies, and other companies may perform any necessary work. 

Having multiple contractors means managing many interfaces and potential gaps between work scopes. These gaps may reduce programme effectiveness. Threats may be overlooked because critical supporting assets receive insufficient attention or because the focus is on each contractor’s objectives rather than optimising the entire work scope. 

An integrated approach

One solution is to outsource the development and execution of the complete IRM process for some or all of your assets. 

An integrated approach may help you to improve IRM processes, drive efficiency and cost savings, and ensure contractor accountability. It can reduce unplanned downtime due to subsea integrity issues by improving inspection campaign efficiency, finding anomalies more reliably and reducing the time taken to resolve them. 

Integration can also provide the complete and consistent datasets necessary to make a robust case for field life extension. 

Innovative, integrated services

Acteon focuses the extensive engineering knowledge and deep domain expertise within the group to design data-driven integrated IRM services for critical subsea infrastructure. 

These customer-specific integrated services, which complement existing IRM processes, maximise the value of integrity data and use them to mitigate threats to critical supporting infrastructure, especially those elements exposed to dynamic loads such as risers, mooring lines, flowlines and jumpers. 

Advanced data-gathering and rapid interpretation capabilities ensure that data can be acted on promptly to reduce the time between finding and resolving an anomaly. This can result in less downtime from unplanned repair work. It also enables risk- and condition-based approaches that may enable inspection intervals to be extended. 

Pragmatic, data-driven integrity management is possible through our digital subsea data management platform, which feeds smart applications. For example, when direct monitoring or survey data are unavailable, correlating data streams gives valuable indicators of asset integrity. This proprietary approach extracts the maximum value from fragmented and siloed field data. Automated data capture technologies and smart inspection and monitoring techniques can also reduce the number of personnel required offshore and increase the efficiency of vessel operations. 

Acteon’s integrated asset integrity services offer a single interface and contract to manage. Moreover, our independence from the need to maintain high vessel utilisation rates enables us to focus on delivering cost-effective integrity management solutions by, for example, planning inspection campaigns and IRM activities across the assets in one or more fields for efficient resource utilisation. The potential exists to create even greater efficiencies through multi-operator, multi-asset IRM campaigns. 

Contact us to discuss your subsea asset integrity management challenges.