Application of accelerated failure model for the oil and gas industry in Arctic region

The development of offshore energy resources involves highly complex and extensive technological processes. Therefore all relevant factors which can affect equipment performance and safety must be identified and quantified exactly. This is more critical when the design is going to be established for a new operational environment such as the Arctic region with new challenges. There are a few data and little experience available regarding operation equipment in the offshore oil and gas industry in the Arctic region. However, the oil and gas industry has established regular programs such as OREDA (Offshore Reliability Data), in order to collect reliability data. Using this type of data, collected from similar systems but under different operational environmental locations, in designing processes for the Arctic region may lead to incorrect design. This may increase risk with respect to Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) or/and increase costs. Therefore, the available data need to be considered according to the environment condition. According to the existing literature, an accelerated failure time (AFT) model is a useful approach in order to consider the effect of the operational environment on the performance of equipment. The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology in order to predict the reliability of equipment in the Arctic region using an accelerated failure time (AFT) model. An illustrative numerical example is used to demonstrate how the model can be applied in a real case.