Practitioners from both the upstream oil and gas industry and the space and satellite sector have repeatedly noted several striking similarities between the two industries over the years, which have in turn resulted in many direct comparisons in the media and industry press.

The similarities between the two industries have even resulted in a modest amount of cross-pollinating between the respective supply chains. Because the operating conditions of both industries are so extreme, some oil and gas equipment vendors have occasionally sourced motors and other parts from aerospace contractors. Also, satellites are now being used to assess oil fires, detect subsidence in oil fields, measure oil spills, collect and transmit operational data from oil and gas fields, and monitor the movement of icebergs that might potentially collide with offshore oil and gas installations.

Relatively little sharing or cross-learning has occurred between the two industries with regards to asset maintenance, however. This is somewhat surprising in light of the fact that here, too, the sectors have much in common. First, the technical challenges facing both industries are often complex and technologically demanding. Second, assets in both sectors are typically difficult to access and offer limited servicing opportunities. Third, both sectors operate in harsh environments and manage assets that are habitually subjected to component wear-out and degradation. And fourth, the life cycles of assets in both industries frequently extend into decades. It therefore follows that the space and satellite sector might be able to offer fresh perspectives and novel ideas about how to maintain oil and gas assets – most notably, offshore platforms.

Five decades of experience in on-orbit servicing (OOS) have resulted in many valuable lessons in the space and satellite industry that can be boiled down into four broad maintenance principles.

Maximizing knowledge of target satellites

Maximizing knowledge about the state of a target satellite is critical to reducing the amount of uncertainty associated with servicing operations. If an orbiting servicing vehicle has perfect information about the satellite, then operations may be precisely scripted. The less knowledge that is available on the target satellite, the more operations need to be adaptable, thereby adding to the complexity of the procedure.

This maintenance principle has clear implications for the 15,000 or so oil and gas platforms and many thousands of miles of pipelines around the world. Each of these assets typically requires several million dollars’ worth of inspections and maintenance-related activities each year to ensure that they have not been seriously affected by a wide variety of potential problems such as mechanical vibration, corrosion, or soil movements on the seabed. The oil and gas industry has made significant progress in the digital oilfield domain, but much of this emphasis so far has been on increased production and greater ultimate recovery. However, the overarching philosophy of the digital oil field – that is, obtaining data about critical parameters of an oil and gas production system and then using these data to optimize performance on a continuous basis – could clearly be applied to the maintenance of these systems, too. Significant reductions might accordingly be possible in maintenance budgets for oil and gas facilities in remote locations if these kinds of “smart” technologies were more aggressively deployed with these functions in mind.

Managing the scale of servicing activities

Managing the scale of servicing activities is critical for controlling the complexity of satellite servicing operations. If the scale of a servicing operation is too great, then it may require multiple servicing vehicles, which could in turn cripple the economic justification for performing the task.

The scale of servicing activities also is quite relevant to offshore oil and gas platforms. Design decisions for these kinds of assets are often based on factors other than long-term serviceability and ROV access. Instead, short-term capital constraints and a strong commitment to working within project budgets often result in design choices that minimize an asset’s up-front price tag while inadvertently increasing long-term life-cycle costs for things like maintenance. This could potentially be avoided if asset design teams were properly incentivized to think more about these long-term costs.

Minimizing the precision of servicing activities

Minimizing the required precision of OOS involves designing satellites so that a helpful amount of tolerance is permitted during servicing operations. Service precision is significantly affected by the degree of component integration within the orbiting satellite. Systems that mainly consist of highly bespoke custom-made components that are developed as an integrated whole do not usually offer the same degree of overall service-related tolerance that more modular systems do, and engineers in the space and satellite sector accordingly tend to strongly prefer modular designs over integrated ones.

This push toward modular systems is very relevant to the upstream oil and gas sector since most of today’s offshore installations tend to be based on highly integrated designs. Earlier attempts in the industry to use more modular designs were only partially successful, and the majority of installations these days are still designed in a way that prioritizes size and weight reductions over modularity and standardization. But major breakthroughs continue to be made with regards to materials, design technologies, and manufacturing methods. The upstream oil and gas industry should therefore consider moving more aggressively toward modular designs as these enabling technologies fall into place.

Minimizing temporal constraints

Timing is an important determinant of success for OOS missions, and the concept of “access timing” – that is, the amount of time required to transport servicing tools to the area of interest on the target satellite – is particularly applicable to maintenance in the upstream oil and gas industry. In much the same way that many satellites deliver functionality that is sorely missed during periods of downtime (e.g., national security or communication links), there are strong financial pressures to maximize the availability of oil and gas facilities. Shutdowns of even a few days can result in losses of millions of dollars in the oil and gas sector. When faced with the threat of shutdown situations in the space and satellite industry, OOS planners frequently include strategies for temporarily outsourcing functions to shield end users from operational downtime.

While it is difficult to “outsource” production streams in an oil and gas setting, there are still some valuable lessons to be gleaned from how the space and satellite sector manages these scenarios. OOS missions are typically designed in a way that dramatically shrinks the possibility of operational downtime, and significant planning and resources are allocated within the space and satellite industry to preemptively guard against these types of failure. This is quite different from the more reactive approach to maintenance that is often the norm in the upstream oil and gas industry.

There are clearly some important differences between the two industries, but the oil and gas industry could potentially make significant improvements in asset maintenance by selectively applying a few of the space and satellite maintenance strategies discussed here.

Acknowledgment

A longer and more academic version of this article, titled “Applying Maintenance Strategies from the Space and Satellite Sector to the Upstream Oil and Gas Industry: A Research Agenda,” was published in Energy Policy volume 61, pages 60 to 64.