Wood Group launches next phase of industry collaboration into subsea equipment reliability

ABERDEEN -- Wood Group announced that it is commencing the next phase of a collaborative industry effort to develop a better understanding of the reliability of subsea equipment for use in offshore Australia.

The Subsea Equipment Australian reliability joint industry project (SEAR JIP) is an initiative led by Wood Group and supported by Shell, Woodside, INPEX and PTTEP.  Now entering into Phase IV, the project is focused on collaboration and knowledge sharing in order to improve subsea equipment design and reduce the requirement for costly and time consuming interventions in Australia’s challenging offshore warm water environment.

This latest phase of the SEAR JIP will:

Facilitate a ‘lessons learned’ forum, where operators will share experience about equipment performance.

Deliver a cloud-based reliability database which will permit the assessment of operators’ equipment performance and comparison of vendors’ performance for equipment installed in Australian waters.

Deliver a testing program with two streams; which will benchmark the ability of different subsea electrical cable designs to block gas permeation and migration, and test new technologies to identify its effectiveness to prevent marine fouling.

Bob MacDonald, CEO of Wood Group’s specialist technical solutions business said: “Wood Group has been leading the SEAR JIP since 2014. We are proud to be driving this project which is delivering a tangible step-change through strong industry collaboration, bringing together the broad expertise and experience of subsea operators, vendors and Australian research institutions to stimulate new solutions for the sector’s reliability challenges.

“In addition, our subsea business is using our data analytics capabilities to help improve reliability, and we hope to be able to combine these learnings with the SEAR program.”

Adriana Botto, Wood Group’s project manager for the SEAR JIP, said: “Our focus is on generating significant cost savings by improving subsea equipment reliability through collaboration and knowledge sharing.  The initial phase of the SEAR JIP underlined how important the issue of subsea reliability is and that significant cost savings could be made by mitigating issues with subsea equipment and reducing the requirement for intervention campaigns.

“This latest phase of the project will deepen our understanding of how we can enhance the design of subsea equipment to avoid time consuming and costly interventions. Harnessing the lessons learned from the SEAR JIP will position us to identify the root cause of equipment performance issues so that they can be designed out by vendors in the future."