OREDA is a project organization sponsored by seven oil and gas companies with worldwide operations. OREDA’s main purpose is to collect and exchange reliability data among the participating companies and act as The Forum for co-ordination and management of reliability data collection within the oil and gas industry. 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 available for our member companies and contractors working on their behalf. (Specialised OREDA software has been developed to collect, retrieve and analyse the information.)
The reliability of E&P equipment has a major impact on safety, production availability and maintenance costs. Ensuring high technical integrity is paramount to safe and reliable operations in E&P, particularly offshore. OREDA has collected data to determine the consequences, the causes and the likelihood of such failures. A query among the OREDA companies shows that the need for such data is high. Oil companies are operating today in a very competitive environment. Here, OREDA can help to optimise life cycle cost and reduce maintenance cost through the application of reliability know-how and data. Traditionally the main use of reliability data has been in engineering design studies. Such data have been given increased attention for use also in the operating phase in recent years.
Collected data are stored in a database containing data from 278 installations, 17 000 equipment units with 39 000 failure and 73 000 maintenance records. The databank also includes subsea fields with over 2000 years operating experience. Only the OREDA member companies have access to the computerised database with its comprehensive search and analysis software. Temporary access may be given to contractors working for the OREDA companies.
The data are recorded per owner and installation. Each individual item (e.g. a gas turbine) occupies a single inventory record in the database. This record contains a technical description (e.g. manufacturer information) plus operating and environmental conditions. For each inventory, all failure events are stored. Each failure event is identified by item name, date of failure, failure impact, failure mode, failure cause etc. The maintenance records contain data on corrective maintenance linked to the corresponding failure record, and data on preventive maintenance linked to the corresponding inventory record.
Purpose made OREDA® software (SW) has been made to handle data collection, acquisition and analysis. Additionally, special utility SW is developed for SW configuration, automated data transfer, quality check etc.
The SW concept is flexible and can be configured to user defined applications. The SW includes features for advanced data search and selection, and commonly used reliability analyses. The software is also used to collect internal company data.
A tailormade SW has been developed for subsea data. This SW module has a feature used as a tool for logging of events.