Oil and gas production facilities

Oil and gas weUs, whether onshore or offshore, operate at extremely high pressures, flows, and temperatures, and the hazards and relating consequences due to operational or equipment problems can be catastrophic, leading to multiple loss of Ufe, substantial revenue losses, and major environmental incidents. 

Companies involved with oil and gas exploration and production from both onshore and offshore facilities, therefore, face the same cost, safety, production, and environmental issues as other industries worldwide. 

The design of safety systems for weUs has been and is still very prescriptive in nature based on current recommended practices like API RP 14C (Ref. 1). Many companies today are also reviewing the design of the safety system for the weUs for compliance with the performance-based requirements of lEC 61508 (Ref. 2) and ANSI/ISA-84.00.01-2004 (lEC 61511 Mod) (Ref. 3) and comparing the differences. Most are discovering that the new standards allow higher levels of safety at a lower cost, thus the enthusiasm for the new standards. 

In this chapter a Safety Instrumented Function (SIF) for gas wells encountered in gas fields will be reviewed. For the SIF identified, a detailed review of the function will be done and a calculation of possible PFDavg values achieved will be done so that the SIL verification for the SIF can be accomplished in part. 

NOTE The data and facilities associated with the example described in this chapter have been tailored to enhance the understanding of the SIL verification techniques and procedures. The facilities do not necessarily comply with national or international norms and should not be used as the basis for any design. 

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Bishop, D. N., Electrical Systems for Oil and Gas Production Facilities. Second Edition, Instrument Society of America, Research Triangle Park, NC, 1992. 

For over four decades, many process engineers have witnessed and participated in many major crude oil and gas production facility conceptual and detail engineering designs. Some of these designs were the first of their type. However, our main core of surface facility design... 

ISO 15926-1 Industrial Automation Systems and Integration - Integration of Life-Cycle Data for Process Plants Including Oil and Gas Production Facilities - Part 1 Overview and Fundamental Principles. International Standard (2004)... 

ISO 15926-3 Industrial automation systems and integration - Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities - Part 3 Ontology for geometry and topology. Standard under development. (2006)... 

If the Oil and Gas Production facilities are to be included in the standard, a paper Lessons Learned From Inspection of 25,000 Upstream Oil and Gas Wells and Associated Plants (Schubert, 2011) provides useful background. Some of the conclusions of that report are as follows. 

Razu, J., Liyanage, J.P. 2008c. An integrated qualitative trend analysis approach to identify process abnormalities A case of oil export pumps in an offshore oil and gas production facility. Accepted for publication in Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering. 

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