FRACAS closed-loop system helps meet API S53 compliance

Over the years, there has been an increasing need to collect data on all events within the Oil & Gas industry where Well Control Equipment (WCE) components fail to perform as designed. In compliance with API S53, details of such events need to be reported to WCE System Integrators and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). To evaluate component performance and enable the industry to improve the overall reliability of such components, they have been using a failure operation database called RAPID-S53 (Reliability and Performance Information Database).

Drilling contractors are moving from seeing failures as a stigma to systematically reporting every event and gathering reliable data despite facing an economic downturn. More and more, they are choosing to invest in resources and see the future as being data-driven as the upstream industry of exploration, drilling, and production is changing.

Challenge

Contractors and operators in the Oil & Gas industry are often dealing with failures that can be critical from both an environmental and financial standpoint, amounting to downtime costing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. Wells are now equipped with more advanced Blow Out Preventer (BOP) Stack Pools comprised of additional components to ensure they meet more stringent safety guidelines preventing catastrophic events. As BOPs become more complex, they require additional maintenance and safety components thereby introducing additional points of failure. As regulations require detailed reporting on increasingly complex equipment, the need to move away from manual reporting has become clearer.

Solution

With rising prices and new regulations, the Oil & Gas industry faces many challenges related to the improvement of equipment reliability and data collected by operators for analysis. From this data, reported as events, it is advantageous to have a simple and efficient way to link events having the same root cause to identify common failures.

HBM Prenscia worked with an offshore drilling contractor to go beyond manual reporting of events to help achieve full regulatory compliance through the implementation of ReliaSoft XFRACAS. XFRACAS is a web-based system that not only enables the reporting process to be managed from failure to resolution but also adds efficiency by enabling events to be assigned to problems in just a couple of clicks. It is a highly configurable system that can greatly enhance customer satisfaction with its extensive, in-depth reporting capabilities and user-friendly interface for event tracking. Its in-depth reporting capabilities make it possible to generate aging reports that can be presented to regulatory entities. 

Go-live training of XFRACAS was delivered to reporting coordinators, enabling them to adopt a much more systematic process approach to ensure data is entered in a more timely and accurate manner. The Prenscia Solutions team also developed a custom tool to enable any existing and historical data to be transferred from the JIP system to XFRACAS. As a result, a repository containing two years’ worth of event data can be created. Overall, the integrity of data, its accuracy, and the assigned actions have improved ownership and participation in the problem resolution.

Results

By implementing XFRACAS, contractors and operators in the Oil & Gas industry can:

• Improve timeliness of reporting events and more easily generate aging reports to present to regulatory entities.
• Take a systematic approach to improve data integrity and accuracy.
• Improve ownership and participation in problem resolution.
• Improve Key Performance Indicators during weekly Failure Review Boards.