Review Paper
Year: 2020 | Month: November | Volume: 7 | Issue: 11 | Pages: 489-498
The Impact of Ageing Facilities on Oil Production in South Sudan
Dr. Akashraj D.P1, Kuol Deng Maleith2
1Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Juba, South Sudan.
2President of Nile Drilling & Service Co. Ltd, South Sudan.
Corresponding Author: Dr. Akashraj D.P
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impacts that ageing facilities and infrastructure have on oil and gas production in South Sudan and assessing life extension in order to ensure the technical and operational integrity of these ageing facilities. Strategies companies plan to use to rein in costs and mitigate risk in the years ahead. Oil and gas operators are now being driven to now operate beyond their originally conceived design life and field life. Asset life extension (ALE) beyond these thresholds presents unique safety and business risk challenges for the oil and gas industry. With aging equipment and facilities, operators face increasing challenges in maintaining equipment reliability and integrity as well as operational safety. Aging factors do not only involve hardware but also human and organizational factors. Factors include corrosion, erosion, fatigue, equipment obsolescence, normalization of deviance (accepting degraded conditions as being normal), changes in codes and standards and lack of data to forecast future risks. With aging equipment and facilities, operators face increasing challenges in maintaining equipment reliability and integrity as well as operational safety. In South Sudan, much of this infrastructure is rapidly ageing, thus increasing the risk of failure. A large number of facilities and parts of the infrastructure of the oil and gas reservoirs nationwide are approaching or have exceeded their original design life. Subsequent disruptions hamstring operations and impede opportunities for growth, with the impact of these interruptions felt in the country’s economy. Furthermore, a lack of infrastructure project oversight and expertise, compounded by insufficient funding is pushing the already fragile drilling systems beyond their limits. The ageing of the South Sudan’s oil and gas (O&G) installations can lead to many incidents. Such installations are over 20 years old (life cycle) and still in operation. To deal with this O&G crucial problem, the South Sudanese authorities have to launch a rehabilitation and modernization schedule of these installations. The objective of this is to highlight the effects of obsolete equipment and infrastructure that is degraded physically and functionally including the human factors and organizational issues. This documentation on ageing mechanisms will provide the assessment of the implications of ageing facilities in the oil production sector in South Sudan and it aims to examine the business implications of infrastructure failures.
Keywords: Ageing oil and gas production facilities, Maintenance, Extension of petroleum production facility service life span, maintenance management, asset life extension, integrity management, safety critical element, oil and gas producers.
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