Brownfield and Beyond

OIL and gas operators face significant challenges to continue producing economically from their fields. Maintaining high standards of safety as well as production targets is key to successful operation but as assets age, more time and money is spent on firefighting repetitive issues. The typical brownfield issues are illustrated in Figure 1.

There is a simple solution to prevent those repetitive failures which cause considerable loss in time and money as well as an increased safety risk: understand the root cause of the problem to identify the appropriate brownfield modification. This article proposes a rigorous method to perform the root cause analysis and also presents an innovative solution to anticipate problems to avoid unwanted shutdowns.