Data integration support for offshore decommissioning waste management

Abstract

Offshore oil and gas platforms have a design life of about 25 years whereas the techniques and tools used for managing their data are constantly evolving. Therefore, data captured about platforms during their lifetimes will be in varying forms. Additionally, due to the many stakeholders involved with a facility over its life cycle, information representation of its components varies. These challenges make data integration difficult. Over the years, data integration technology application in the oil and gas industry has focused on meeting the needs of asset life cycle stages other than decommissioning. This is the case because most assets are just reaching the end of their design lives.

Currently, limited work has been done on integrating life cycle data for offshore decommissioning purposes, and reports by industry stakeholders underscore this need.

This thesis proposes a method for the integration of the common data types relevant in oil and gas decommissioning. The key features of the method are that it (i) ensures semantic homogeneity using knowledge representation languages (Semantic Web) and domain specific reference data (ISO 15926); and (ii) allows stakeholders to continue to use their current applications. Prototypes of the framework have been implemented using open source software applications and performance measures made. The work of this thesis has been motivated by the business case of reusing offshore decommissioning waste items. The framework developed is generic and can be applied whenever there is a need to integrate and query disparate data involving oil and gas assets. The prototypes presented show how the data management challenges associated with assessing the suitability of decommissioned offshore facility items for reuse can be addressed. The performance of the prototypes show that significant time and effort is saved compared to the state-of‐the‐art solution. The ability to do this effectively and efficiently during decommissioning will advance the oil the oil and gas industry’s transition toward a circular economy and help save on cost.