Improving Safety of Deepwater Drilling Through Advanced Instrumentation, Diagnostics, and Automation for BOP Control Systems

Abstract

Abstract Among the contributors to excessive downtime for deepwater drilling are undetected failures in blowout preventer (BOP) control systems. These undetected failures result from the limited instrumentation of current systems, and require use of conservative criteria to decide if the BOP should be pulled to the surface for maintenance. The safety and risk effects of undetected failures are currently measurable only indirectly by the consequence of excessive non-productive time. A reliability- and human-centered design approach has been developed for next-generation BOP control systems to improve the safety of deepwater drilling by providing additional redundancy and fault tolerance, more accurate information regarding control system health, and clear guidance for determining whether the control system should be reconfigured to compensate for failures or pulled to the surface for maintenance. Enhanced instrumentation is provided to enable improved diagnostics and prognostics, measurable safety integrity levels, and reduced human errors in pull/no pull decisions. This approach has been applied to the development of advanced BOP control systems that include innovative design features to reduce downtime and enhance safety for deepwater drilling. The approach focuses on development of advanced instrumentation and decision support for continuous assessment of BOP health, assessment of compliance to regulatory and industry standards for BOP functions, automatic reconfiguration to compensate for component failures, and determination whether operations can continue or if the BOP must be pulled for maintenance.