KKI saves the day for Caspian operator

London – When engineers at a company operating offshore in the Caspian Sea experienced a valve failure, they initially expected the resulting, unscheduled outage to last for at least two weeks.

The main gas export valve a 16in ANSI 1500 valve with pressure sealed bonnet and 14in trim had failed and a new trim was urgently required to avoid a major loss of production.

The company contacted Brighouse, UK-based valve manufacturer Koso Kent Introl (KKI), which ordered the raw material for the valve elements and began manufacture.

During update discussions between the offshore operator and valves company, it emerged that there were application issues with the original trim specification. KKI recommended a modification to the design of the original plug stem assembly.

The Yorkshire company’s aftercare team made the required upgrade modifications and incorporated them into the new plug assembly in production. As time was critical, KKI worked with the client to arrange for it to be loaded onto a charter plane at Doncaster, to be flown back to Baku.

Two KKI service engineers accompanied the trim during transit to ensure that the valve was assembled correctly, tested and loaded into a waiting supply vessel. One of the engineers then flew offshore to supervise the valve being re-commissioned, with the entire upgrade taking just nine days.

According to KKI, its aftercare team often recommend such application reviews in the course of their work. The reviews often identify scope for upgrades, such as increasing the valve’s capacity, or increasing its robustness to process conditions that would otherwise reduce the valve/trim’s life span.

Trims are one of the most common ways a valve can be upgraded via size, style, materials, packing arrangements although instrumentation and actuators might equally benefit from a review, the company noted.

KKI’s aftercare team has recently moved into a larger facility adjacent to the company’s other facilities in Brighouse. The plant includes facilities to manufacture spares on site. It will enable KKI to support larger scheduled shutdown contracts, and maintenance programmes that demand high-volume turnaround in short timescales.

According to Mackay, his company’s Asset Guardian product provides a secure, centralised means of managing and reporting on configuration change, software revision status, fault logging and system installed bypasses. It can, he adds, store any type of software and also manage it.

Among recent applications for Asset Guardian’s technology, Mackay points out how Technip UK and BP have used the software as part of their efforts to protect their critical assets and ensure compliance with an ever-growing list of regulations, directives and best practices.

Technip has installed Asset Guardian on both its pipelay vessel Deep Blue and new dive support vessel Skandi Arctic the first ship to have a computer-controlled diving system.

A satellite broadband connection, security control and Aberdeen-based servers all mean that the onshore engineers have central access to all the data on board the vessels. Additional licences have also been purchased to allow Technip to roll this out across the remainder of its fleet.
The central configuration management and database system provided is central to maintaining accuracy of information in Technip’s offshore work environment.

Asset Guardian meets these needs by enabling information to be updated simultaneously both offshore and onshore, giving them real-time visibility of the data. It also complies with important IEC standards 61508 and 61511.

BP’s most recent implementation of the software took place during the conversion of an oil tanker to an FPSO vessel. The completed vessel, which refines the oil as it is being transported, has a storage capacity of 1.6 million bbl and is used to explore ultra-deepwater fields.

Implementing the software during the commissioning phase of this project allows the knowledge gained during this critical stage to continue to be of use during the entire lifespan of field operations.