UPTIME for Oil & Gas Pipelines

The safety and reliability of the world’s oil and gas pipelines are of critical importance to industry, the public and local, national and international owner operators. The impact of a pipeline failure whether it is environmental, human life, infrastructure or business loss can be catastrophic.As part of Noble Offshore’s comprehensive support for the safe and reliable operation of oil and gas pipelines, the Uptime product suite provides a fully integrated software solution for the integrity and risk management of these assets. Whether you require a solution to satisfy local regulatory requirements, comply with internal company policies and standards or to implement and support a performance based integrity management plan, then the Uptime solution suite can be configured to support these business needs.Noble Offshore has true global reach with on the ground resources in more regions and countries than any of its competitors helping make our asset integrity software solutions a market leader in the support of the global pipeline industry and particularly in supporting assets managed under the jurisdiction of varying regulatory bodies while also having to adhere to a global corporate strategy.

Optimising Information Value

Lost, corrupt or badly managed asset information may result in significant costs to an operator each year that the asset remains in operation; this is nowhere more obvious than in the operating stage of the asset lifecycle. This cost arises from having to reproduce data by re-inspection, engineers and managers tracking down poorly maintained records and also through poor or inappropriate utilisation of expensive asset condition information.

UPTIME offers a comprehensive integrated information management environment for oil and gas pipelines which helps significantly reduce these operating costs. The extensive range of information management and data maintenance tools are business process oriented with an intuitive interface helping reduce time to return on solution investment. Consider the ability to manage sub-cm accurate spatial pipeline routing and asset information and to accurately align your multi-year inline inspection surveys, above ground potential surveys and all other pipeline integrity data with these and to do it all in one environment. The inbuilt asset history tracking capability allows the management of pipeline re-routes, replacements and repairs.

The UPTIME asset database, built to industry best practice, is central to theNoble Offshore asset information management solution. The UPTIME Facility Editor and Bulk Data Alignment and Administration tools complete the suite of functionality that can help deliver a pipeline operator with immediate return on the investment by increasing productivity and by delivering a platform of accurate and timely information which is a pre-requisite for optimal asset integrity and risk analysis. This in turn serves as the basis for effective business decision making which will help reduce societal, environmental and business risk, maximise returns on operating costs and improve lifetime performance of the asset.

Comprehensive Asset Integrity and Risk Analysis

The effective management of data, information and knowledge are the foundation of better business decisions but these decisions also depend on business tools which can help quantify asset performance and identify where actions must be taken to improve performance and reduce risk in the operation of the asset. The visualisation and analytical tools within UPTIME provide just such a toolset for oil and gas pipelines.

Visualisation: Business context  viewing and reporting options present information to executives, managers and engineers in spatial, graphical and tabular forms which aid business and engineering decision making.

Key to this is a fully integrated LA environment, a dynamic and interactive Alignment Sheet Generator and business focused reports which can be entirely maintained within the information system.

Integrity Analysis: Expensive inline inspection or above ground survey data sets are generally underutilised in determining current pipeline condition and in the planning of future asset operations. The UPTIME toolset provides the capability to manage such data consistent with regulatory guidelines and industry standards but unlike many alternative solutions it also provides advanced capabilities which can help in determining optimal performance based planning. The UPTIME integrity analysis capability can help with planning safe pipeline operations and targeting effective expenditure on repair, re-inspection and other failure threat mitigation methods.

UPTIME supports analysis and processes for inline inspection (ILI), direct assessment process (DA), above ground surveys (such as CIPS and DCVG), corrosion management (CP) and excavation planning.

Risk Assessment: UPTIME, which provides the most comprehensive spatial risk analysis tool on the market, can help users configure their risk assessment programme to become a powerful business analysis and decision making environment. With the ability to build, maintain and deploy qualitative, semi-quantitative or fully quantitative risk models this highly flexible environment can be configured to meet the needs of any operator. Reporting and visualisation tools provide the user with powerful methods to help understand the threats to their pipeline system and the degree of threat posed. This permits them to take early preventative and corrective actions in the management of the pipeline and helps reduce the risk of environmental, societal and business loss incidents.

UPTIME Risk Manager provides a Risk Modeller environment for building and maintaining a library of risk models and a Risk Analysis component for running risk analysis including process management, scenario management and reporting. The Dynamic Segmentation tool may be used either embedded within a model or independently for the determination of risk segments.

The risk assessment manager can be configured with an operator’s own risk models or they can be supplied by configuring a range of industry leading risk models available from Noble Offshore. The Noble Offshore risk consulting staff can assist a user in the correct choice and configuration of models.

Compliance and Inspection Management

A complete solution for integrity, risk and compliance management can be provided by including Noble Offshore’s Essentials alongside UPTIME in a fully integrated environment. Essentials can manage all your scheduled inspection needs including leak patrols, corrosion management, valve inspections and many other compliance needs.