Over the last few decades, the global energy and processing industries have been facing three simultaneous challenges in the management of asset integrity and major incidents prevention:
§ Increasing consequences of major incidents: environmental, legal, financial and reputational.
§ Ageing facilities, which are required to continue to operate safely, despite having met their nominal design life and at the same time prevent the immediate risk of major accidents.
§ The additional challenge of paucity of funds in the period of uncertain prices and market downturn.
State Oil and Gas Regulators worldwide have also stated their concerns and some have issued guidelines for ageing plants. A methodology for managing the integrity of ageing facilities is now under discussion worldwide. Many of the approaches are borrowed from the nuclear power industry, which operate numerous ageing facilities.
This breakfast meeting seeks to have a dialogue on the globally emerging practices for ageing plants and their application to our assets in the local industry. Our challenges are not unique and we can learn from the shared experience of other organizations and countries.
We will first review several case histories of such major incidents around the world and draw lessons from them. The presenter will show that the root causes of failures over the last five decades are in fact, a handful in number but they keep recurring. The deeper, underlying structural causes are examined and a strategy for managing them is presented in both upstream and downstream energy facilities. Many commonly held myths and misconceptions are debunked.
The LEAP (Life Extension of Ageing Plant) Strategy is explained; this proposes a road map for a practical solution to these apparently conflicting demands. The Energy Chamber hopes that this Breakfast Meeting will start a more meaningful discussion on this criticalsubject.
Date: Tuesday 8th December, 2015
Venue: Cara Suites Hotel and Conference Centre, Claxton Bay
Time: 9:00am -11:00am (Registration & breakfast begin at 8:30am)
Cost: Members TT$375 plus VAT & Non -members TT$400 plus VAT
The Presenter: Kiriti Bhattacharya
Kiriti Bhattacharya has worked in the various facets of the international Energy Industry over the last 40 years. His professional expertise is in the area of Plant Degradation and Asset Integrity Management.
Kiriti is a 1972 graduate in ‘Metallurgy & Material Science’ of the University of Toronto. His working career started here in Trinidad with Texaco (Pointe-a-Pierre). Subsequently, he worked as Engineering Manager at Damus Ltd. (1979-1989). In 1989 he joined the Royal Dutch Shell Group. With Shell, he served in various international technical management roles in Refining and Distribution internationally. In 2005 he moved to Shell International in London as General Manager (Engineering) for the Global Supply & Distribution Division spanning all of the S&D facilities and pipelines in 30 countries including those in Latin America, USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and Middle East-Asia. He has now retired from Shell and renders consultancy and training services to clients worldwide.
His major achievement in Shell was the development and implementation of the Global (D) Asset Management System and within it the Integrity Programmes deployed through a Global SAP platform, which is in use to this day. He credits his professional foundation knowledge to his years in Trinidad prior to his deployment overseas.