ADNOC Case Studies Illustrate Importance of Technology Qualification Process

Abstract

For operators and service companies looking to gain an edge in a growing technology marketplace, the link between technology development strategy and overall operational strategy is fundamental. Careful planning is required to ensure the efficient use of resources on technologies that target high-priority problems and high-impact solutions, while responding to near-term challenges and laying the foundation for longer-term goals. An established roadmap could serve as a point of reference to satisfy technology requirements in response to current and arising challenges for a company looking to produce new technologies in-house or facilitate the development with other companies. With that in mind, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s (ADNOC) Upstream Directorate developed a stage-gate process for new technology development and qualification. The process was designed to minimize the risk associated with deploying new technologies to a level that can be managed or mitigated, ensuring compliance with operational constraints and promoting the safety of assets and people. Sherif El-Gharbawy, ADNOC’s authority on technology maturity, presented a paper outlining case studies on the development and qualification process, Tech Qual, at the 2017 Offshore Technology Conference (OTC). At last year’s OTC, he presented a paper with coauthor, Wafik Beydoun on the establishment of ADNOC’s technology development process. That paper outlined the company’s use of Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) to advance the development of a new, or unproven, technology along a structured path toward deployment or commercialization. Developed by NASA in the 1980s to help qualify spacecraft design, the TRL is a means of estimating the readiness of a component to be implemented into an operating system. The process involves the establishment of stage gates to facilitate the transition of the technology from one phase to the next while staying focused on applicability and profitability. “[The NASA TRL Scale] is the original scale and most-recognized scale, both globally and regionally in the Arabian Gulf area,” El-Gharbawy said about ADNOC’s adoption of TRLs. “It was made simpler and adapted to fit our operations terminology and technology development phases as opposed to NASA’s flight simulation applications.” ADNOC Research and Development manages the progress in TRLs 1–6 (Fig. 1) before transferring those responsibilities to its operating companies (OPCOs). Along with the research and development teams from its OPCOs, service companies, and international shareholders, ADNOC leads the technology development phase between TRLs 4 and 6, with the OPCOs taking ownership afterward. The goal is to steer the development process away from the “Valley of Death,” a term used to describe a technology’s failure to reduce risk through development, and hence bridge the gap between fundamental research in the lower TRLs and commercialization in the higher TRLs.