Optimization of Maintenance Strategies in an Oil and Gas Production Facility to Minimize Maintenance Cost

Abstract: In this study, maintenance strategies in an oil and gas production facility were optimized to minimize maintenance costs. The centrifugal pump system in Port Harcourt Refinery was selected for this study because it significantly impacts on the productivity of the refining plant. The pump system’s failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) were examined, and an optimized maintenance task was developed for the system. The exponential reliability method was employed to analyse the pump’s failure data to determine the pump systems' failure rate and reliability while reliability centred maintenance (RCM) and linear programming (LP) model were employed to optimize the pump’s maintenance strategies and the pump’s maintenance labour force respectively. Broad-based results of the optimized maintenance strategies consisted of on-condition-directed (CD) maintenance, preventive maintenance (PreM), and Proactive maintenance (ProM) strategies to be carried out monthly. The optimized maintenance labour force result revealed that approximately three engineers and two technicians should be employed for the pump’s maintenance task with a minimum of N2, 585, 700 as cost of salaries for the labour force monthly as against the current maintenance labour force requiring fourteen engineers and thirteen technicians monthly. The results showed that the labour cost decreased from N180,000,000 per year to N31,028,400 per year (approximately 82.76% reduction) using the proposed optimized maintenance task compared to the current maintenance plan. Conclusion and recommendation were made that the maintenance optimization technique presented in this work should be adopted by the oil and gas processing and production companies in order to minimize maintenance cost.