Overview of Case Studies for Draft ISO 19906

Abstract

Abstract The new international code ISO 19906 "Petroleum and natural gas industries - Arctic offshore structures" [1] was published in December 2010 after more than nine years of development, see Spring et al. [2]. Under the ISO process for standards development, ISO/DIS 19906 (the draft for public comment) was published in January 2009 and distributed to all ISO member countries for review and comment by June 2009. During this five-month period the opportunity was taken to perform case studies to ensure that the provisions of the code and its references were sufficiently complete for an experienced and knowledgeable engineer to design the structures within its scope. The objectives were to identify errors and gaps, ensure that diverse structures were adequately addressed, and to collate comments to the ISO draft for consideration by the Technical Panels with delegated responsibility for the provisions as they prepared the Final Draft. This paper sets out the case studies performed and the improvements arising in the final document resulting from comments provided by the organisations performing the case studies. Introduction The new ISO 19906 has been developed in Working Group 8 (WG8) of ISO Technical committee TC67/SC7 "Offshore structures". Experts from all arctic nations and from most other nations involved in the design of offshore structures in arctic and cold regions participated in WG8. Consequently, all the arctic nations and all European nations have undertaken to adopt ISO 19906 into their sets of national standards, and ISO 19906 is expected to be adopted worldwide for design of arctic offshore structures. WG8 and its supporting industry therefore decided to initiate a programme of case studies both to validate the standard and to start the process of industry engagement. WG8 established TP10 "Case studies and calibration" in June 2008 to execute a calibration study and to perform case studies on ISO/DIS 19906. The members were volunteers from around the world, many from the oil and gas companies who would be future owners and operators of arctic offshore structures.. TP10 defined eight cases for study. Each case was for a specific structure type in a specified arctic region, with key parameters defined but otherwise it was left to the performer of the study to bring their experience and knowledge to complete the scenario. Proposals were sought from organizations around the world, including consultants, design contractors, universities, research institutes and classification societies. Forty seven offers were received, from North America, Europe and Russia, of which fifteen were contracted using industry funding and one was offered at no cost TP10 held five meetings and corresponded extensively by email and telephone conference calls. The OGP (the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers) facilitated funding from oil companies participating in WG8 and TP10 to fund TP10's activity. The OGP also acted as the administrator for the contracts required to execute the work directed by TP10.