Oil and Gas Companies Must Strive to Eliminate Downtime

•   Jason Simons
•   Aug 29, 2020

Why Oil and Gas Companies Must Strive to Eliminate Downtime

All Oil and Gas Companies Share One Common Requirement: Monitoring and Optimizing Their Well Performance to Ensure Budgets Are Met and Downtime is Minimized. Why? Because It’s All About Operational Efficiency Nowadays…

As oil prices recover, most oil and gas companies are starting to ramp up their investments to maintain or increase output. But unfortunately, downtime continues to impact the industry, whether it’s planned or unplanned, resulting in an inability to produce consistently. An ARC survey found that companies lose approximately 3-5% of their production to unplanned downtime. In many cases, this unplanned downtime can be prevented through proper maintenance, as well as:

1. Utilizing the appropriate industry knowledge to apply advanced analytics that enables a more predictive state.
2. Implementing optimization tools designed to create and maintain a maintenance strategy.
3. Ensuring efficient collection and visualization of data related to equipment performance and/or condition.

Essentially, the industry requires a greater deal of operational efficiency through monitoring and optimizing well performance. This is best achieved through data-based and analytics-driven maintenance – a more modern approach that many oil and gas companies have yet to embrace.

What Does Downtime Cost the Average Oil and Gas Company?

When downtime occurs, the average cost can be as high as $20,000 per day with an annual financial impact of approximately $450,003. Where do these costs come from? There are direct costs and hidden costs that make up the bulk of the costs, including:

• Repair costs (71%)
• Labor costs (40%)
• Transportation/logistics (37%)

The bottom line? Unplanned downtime is incredibly costly and the industry’s approach to maintenance tends to be outdated. Consider this… If you have 10,000 barrels per day of oil production, a 1% gain in asset utilization can result in MILLIONS of dollars of revenue added to your bottom line. This is where proper maintenance is crucial as it enables you to minimize downtime while ensuring you’re utilizing your assets properly.

How Does ICS Ensure Proper Asset Utilization Through Predictive Maintenance?

ICS focuses our approach on helping you properly utilize your assets with predictive maintenance – based on time or usage statistics – to keep your operations running smoothly. As technology advances, we’re able to leverage a mix of tools, such as the cloud, analytics, and computing power, to keep an eye on your equipment performance – from pumps to compressors to turbines and everything in between. This enables us to:

1. Identify and diagnose any potential operating issues before any sort of failure can occur.
2. Minimize unplanned downtime as we improve the availability of all of your assets.
3. Reduce the ongoing cost of maintenance, and in turn, operations.
4. Extend the useful life of your equipment to help you stay on track in terms of budgeting.

Ready to Minimize Downtime in Your Oil & Gas Company? Contact ICS: The Top IT Services Company in San Antonio, Houston, Austin, and Across Texas. Call (281) 962-3058.

Jason Simons

ICS is a Texas-based 37-year-old technology company specializing in Managed IT, VoIP, Video Conferencing and Video Surveillance solutions for US and International businesses. ICS has over 4000 regional installations and specializes in multi-site businesses between 25 and 2500 employees. ICS’s customers enjoy the experience of ICS’s Total Care program which provides clients flat fee services with obsolescence and growth protection. Whether a customer elects to deploy their IT, Video Conferencing or VoIP in the cloud or on the customer’s premise, ICS can provide a full turn-key solution for our clients under one flat monthly fee.