Representative Leadership Experience: Offshore Risk-Based Inspection and Fitness-for-Service Program

This case study represents prior leadership and project management experience of a current key member of TES Canada's leadership team, gained during an earlier international role. The original project was not executed by TES Canada. Client, country, platform names, and facility identifiers have been fully anonymized. The experience and methodology now inform TES Canada's RBI, FFS, and offshore facility integrity capability.

A national offshore oil operator required an integrity management improvement program for two offshore production platforms. The platforms contained complex interconnected pressure equipment, process piping circuits, produced water systems, gas compression equipment, separators, desalters, dehydration units, pressure safety valves, and utility systems — each with distinct service conditions, fluid characteristics, and degradation profiles.

Traditional time-based inspection scheduling at the facility did not adequately differentiate between high-risk and low-risk equipment, nor did it reflect the specific damage mechanisms active in each service environment. The operator required a structured, defensible RBI approach to prioritize inspections, focus resources on critical assets, and reduce the risk of unplanned failures.

The central challenge was implementing a structured RBI program across two offshore platforms simultaneously — converting fragmented inspection records, maintenance histories, process data, and operator knowledge into a defensible risk-ranked inspection planning basis — while integrating concurrent FFS engineering work on selected piping welds identified through advanced NDT.

Damage mechanisms on offshore production platforms are numerous and interacting. Chloride stress corrosion cracking and pitting on stainless steel cladded fixed equipment, internal metal loss from erosion and erosion-corrosion in produced water and process piping, CO2 corrosion, HCl corrosion, atmospheric corrosion, corrosion under insulation, cavitation, and weld-root degradation were all potentially active — requiring disciplined multi-mechanism screening rather than a generic damage table approach.

Offshore production platforms combine high-consequence equipment, corrosive and erosive process fluids, complex piping networks, limited shutdown windows, access constraints, and multiple interacting damage mechanisms. The consequence of unplanned equipment failure in this environment ranges from production loss to safety-critical events — meaning conservative but targeted risk ranking is essential.

The RBI program required integration of process, inspection, maintenance, and corrosion monitoring data from multiple sources, not all of which were consistently documented or readily available. Data gaps had to be managed through conservative assumptions with explicit documentation, rather than filled by default values that could obscure actual risk drivers.

The FFS work on selected produced-water, recycle, and disposal piping welds required TOFD data interpretation and fracture mechanics screening under BS 7910 where weld-root corrosion profiles were insufficient for direct Level 2 assessment. Conservative treatment of incomplete flaw geometry data was required to maintain assessment defensibility without understating risk.

Project management complexity was significant: parallel RBI and FFS workstreams, multi-disciplinary team coordination across inspection, corrosion engineering, materials, process, and operations disciplines, remote finalisation of RBI calculations following offshore data gathering, and delivery of both written schemes of examination and FFS results within a structured reporting framework.

The RBI program delivered a structured, risk-ranked inspection planning basis for two offshore production platforms — converting fragmented inspection and process data into a defensible, standards-aligned integrity management framework. Fixed equipment, process and produced-water piping, and PSVs were ranked by risk and inspection urgency. Written schemes of examination were produced, replacing generic time-based schedules with risk-informed inspection plans targeted at the identified damage mechanisms and risk drivers for each equipment item.

The damage mechanism review identified chloride-related degradation of stainless steel cladding as the dominant threat for many fixed equipment items, and internal metal loss from erosion/erosion-corrosion as the primary risk driver for produced-water and aqueous process piping systems. These findings focused inspection and maintenance resources on the locations and mechanisms with the greatest potential consequence — rather than distributing effort uniformly across the asset population.

FFS assessment of TOFD inspection data identified a subset of produced-water piping welds requiring further attention before the target inspection interval, including selected welds requiring immediate action. This finding demonstrated the value of integrating advanced NDT data directly into engineering assessment — translating field measurements into actionable integrity decisions rather than storing them as inspection records awaiting future review. The program established a repeatable process for updating the RBI system with new inspection and corrosion monitoring data, creating a sustainable integrity management cycle rather than a one-time assessment.