History

For many years Norwegian and foreign oil companies have been collaborating with SINTEF Technology and Society, Dept. of Safety and Reliability, DNV (Oslo) and other consultants in the collection of data on maintenance, reliability and safety of offshore installations. Used in conjunction with specially developed software, these data provide a basis for the preparation of reliability analyses. Such analyses simplify the job of selecting the "best" technical solutions and have led to significant savings in the development and operation of platforms.

Reliability is a decisive aspect of equipment installed on offshore installations. Equipment faults alone, or in combination with other factors, have been the cause of a number of accidents. Low oil prices and tighter profit margins mean that the cost of shutdowns is of greater importance.

In the early 80s a number of oil companies operating in the North Sea and the Adriatic started a collaborative project. The idea was to survey the reliability of important equipment under 'real life' operational conditions. The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (now: Petroleum Safety Authority) initiated the OREDA Project in 1981. It was agreed that OREDA was to be run by a group of oil companies in 1983. The project, which was given the acronym OREDA^® (Offshore REliability DAta), has been carried out in nine phases by the end of 2008. It has shown to be a sustainable JIP and in 2006 OREDA celebrated its 25 years anniversary.

OREDA has established a comprehensive databank with reliability and maintenance data for exploration and production equipment from a wide variety of geographic areas, installations, equipment types and operating conditions. Offshore subsea and topside equipment are primarily covered, but onshore equipment is also included. The OREDA data are stored in a database, and specialised OREDA software and guidelines have been developed to collect, retrieve and analyse the information. Currently the database contains data from > 265 installations, 16 000 equipment units with 38000 failure and 68 000 maintenance records. The databank also includes subsea fields with almost 2000 well-years operating experience.

In addition to the build-up of a large reliability databank, and the use of data by the participating companies, achievements in the OREDA include:

Standards for reliability data collection. An ISO Standard based on the OREDA concept was issued in 2006 (ISO 14 224: “Petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas industries – Collection and exchange of reliability and maintenance data for equipment”).
Guidelines and software for data collection and data analysis
Publication of reliability data. Five public editions of a Reliability Data Handbook have been issued (1984, -92, -97, -02, -09), which is sold in more than 50 countries world-wide.
Data used in analyses for decision support for e.g. concept selection, design optimisation.
Exchange of reliability knowledge between the participating companies, and co-operation with miscellaneous parties such as manufacturers, research institutes etc.
Formalised co-operation with the subsea system suppliers Cameron, FMC Kongsberg Subsea, Aker Solutions and Vetco Gray
Promotion of the OREDA concept and OREDA data application by > 40 papers at various international conferences
Training courses and material for OREDA data users
Data used in various research projects and student thesis

A Steering Committee (SC) comprising one member and one deputy member from each participating company manages OREDA. The SC elects one of its members as Chairman and appoints a Project Manager (PM). PM co-ordinates the activities approved by the SC including quality control of data. DNV (Oslo) served as project manager during the phases I and II (1983 - 90) and resume this role in phase X (2009). SINTEF Technology and Society, Dept. of Safety and Reliability have been project manager in phases III - IX (1990-2008). The company "ADB Systemer" (Stavanger) is responsible for maintenance of the data collection and analysis software. Bi-Cycle (Sweden) is currently engaged in the development of a new data analysis software.

Runar Østebø from Statoil has been the chairman of OREDA until February 1^st 2010. Steve Burchell from BP is the new Steering Committee chairman from that date.

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Last Updated: 1. February 2010