Digital innovation in subsea integrity management

Since the 2014 oil-price downturn, the offshore oil and gas industry has accelerated implementation of digital technologies to drive cost efficiencies for exploration and production operations. The upstream offshore sector comprises many interfacing disciplines such as subsurface, drilling and completions, facilities and production operations. Digital initiatives in subsurface imaging, drilling of subsea wells and topsides integrity have been well publicised within the industry. Integrity of the subsea infrastructure is one area that is currently playing catch up in the digital space and lends itself well for data computational efficiencies that artificial-intelligence technologies provide, to reduce cost and lower the risk of subsea equipment downtime. This paper details digital technologies employed in the area of subsea integrity management to meet the objectives of centralising access to critical integrity data, automating workflows to collect and assess data, and using machine learning to perform more accurate and faster engineering analysis with large volumes of field-measured data. A comparison of a typical subsea field is presented using non-digital and digital approaches to subsea integrity management (IM). The comparison demonstrates where technologies such as digital twins for dynamic structures, and auto anomaly detection by using image recognition algorithms can be deployed to provide a step change in the quality of subsea integrity data coming from field. It is demonstrated how the use of a smart IM approach, combined with strong domain knowledge in subsea engineering, can lead to cost efficiencies in operating subsea assets.