A method for failures grouping and priority ranking case study: Operating gas compression plant

The gas compression plant is a core and major unit in oil and gas industries that have high gas oil ratio or considerable gas production. Compressed gas is needed as fuel, support processing handling, increase reservoir builds up pressure by gas injection as well as a useful product. Gas plants are critical and dangerous working location and it is classified as a critical zone due to circumstance parameters like high pressure, high temperature, gas specifications and the potential to impact to human health, safety, environment and possibility to impact invested revenues in case of incidents. Therefore, all recorded compression plant operational failures shall be assessed and reviewed in order to decrease the unit down time and increase plant safety and efficiency. In general, limited studies were conducted in gas plant maintenance management. This paper studied a working gas compression unit in an operating oil and gas field in order to present the followings: • A model of failures raking and sorting in gas compression plants based on total down time importance (TDTI) grouping. • A model of failures ranking by using the risk priority number (RPN). RPN is giving priorities based on associated risk and TDTI as a new method is providing rankings based on maximum contribution to the total occurred down time. Therefore, the study is elaborating to demonstrate these two methods and highlighted the areas of difference which need attention of the owner and the site working team.