Houston: DNV is assisting the American oil major Chevron in developing a guideline for qualifying new technology.
DNV has during the last several years gained a considerable amount of experience in managing technology qualification projects based on DNV’s recommended practise – “Qualification Procedure for New Technology”.
The guideline will be a structured risk based process that will give Chevron’s project managers a tool to assist them in managing the risks associated with introducing new technology or moving a proven technology into a more extreme operating environment.
Chevron’s goal is to reduce the risk of deploying new technology while leveraging technology to deliver superior performance and growth of their projects.
New technology has not always had a good reputation in the oil and gas industry due to failures resulting from inadequate qualification programs. New technology is often evolved from existing technologies and put into more challenging operating conditions without fully understanding the parameters that influence its performance.
Analytical models are not regularly used to predict the performance of the technology while at the same time it is very difficult and prohibitively costly to test the actual operating environment. In addition, failure modes or threats to the technologies are usually not systematically identified. This often leads to schedule overruns or worse, failure during deployment or operation.
As the industry moves into deeper waters, the consequence of a failure is so great that the qualification program must provide a very high degree of confidence in the technology.
Qualification is defined as the process of providing the evidence that the technology will function within specific limits with an acceptable level of confidence.
Therefore, DNV and Chevron will have a strong focus on documenting the performance of the technology through analysis, testing and experience under representative operating conditions and also determining the margin to failure for the various failure modes.