Talkback: Technology: a productivity driver

Ashish Bhandari, Oil and Gas Marketing Manager at GE, explains how technology is driving NDT inspection productivity.

Where have all the people gone? According to oil and gas industry leaders, decades of slow growth and the associated drive to cut costs have driven a deep chasm in the age profile of the industry’s workforce. The inspection industry servicing this market is no different. The average age of an API-qualified ultrasonic (UT) worker is in the mid 40s, with a younger workforce coming up to speed at a slow pace. Technology that drives productivity will help bridge the gap.

Demand for inspection services to grow

CAPEX in the oil and gas industry historically grew at approximately 3.5 percent. Recently however, the rate of growth more than quadrupled with even higher growth expected over the next five years. Every new pipeline laid in Canada, every LNG pressure vessel installed in Qatar and every new refinery in India requires tens of thousands of welds to be inspected. Inspection requires people.

Corrosion issues with aging assets compounds demand. The average age of a refinery or pipeline in the US is more than 40 years, yet we demand these assets to run at higher capacities than ever before. Singular events such as a pipeline leak in Alaska required dozens of inspection crews to be mobilized there overnight, resulting in projects in Houston and elsewhere being delayed. Growth in CAPEX and plant inspection OPEX suggests that the NDT inspection services industry will grow at 15-20 percent annually for the next five years.

Labor demands outstripping supply

While demand for NDT inspection grows annually in double digits, new labor is coming in at a rate of only seven to eight percent. At a recent conference, I noticed that a board advertising open positions was full – in complete contrast to the empty one next to it for individuals soliciting jobs. The reasons are simple enough – NDT technicians are still underpaid relative to their field counterparts in other oil and gas segments and in other industries, and training a technician in some of the commonly used techniques can take years. My analysis indicates that given current practices, by 2010 the industry in North America alone will be short to the tune of more than 5000 NDT technicians.

Technology is the potential solution

A major oil company concerned with monitoring sand erosion on offshore platforms in Indonesia installed permanent thickness monitoring sensors based on GE’s Rightrax technology. Formerly, technicians traveling by helicopter regularly made manual thickness measurements. However, using automated quantitative corrosion readings delivered directly to a control room, the company was able to direct the technicians towards more complex inspection tasks. Computed radiography, thickness and weld flaw inspection using UT and remote visual inspection are technologies that can drive similar productivity in everyday NDT inspection tasks.

In general, technology of two kinds is driving productivity. The first kind involves hardware and sensor-related breakthroughs. The Phasor introduced recently by GE is one such product. It’s a simple, portable, affordable instrument that takes the task of flaw detection to the next level by offering significantly better probability of detection and inspection speed than conventional alternatives. Faster inspections follow from not having to do wedge and probe changeover and from better and quicker sizing of flaws. The ability to hand over jpeg image files speeds up reporting. GE’s IPC2 CR imaging plate that significantly reduces shot times for profile radiography is another productivity-enhancing product.

Software drives the second kind of productivity and involves workflow optimization. Typical inspectors spend more than half of their time developing reports, creating work orders and searching for old logs. Technology has gone digital, but for most service companies life hasn’t really changed. Instead of delivering radiography films and UT logs, we now deliver CDs containing the same information. Working this way, to the end-user, is life as usual.

Rhythm, GE's image management software, changes this. It offers a digital highway for inspection data that allows service companies to download jobs, create rapid reports and send inspection reports at a click of a button. To the asset owner, it offers ready instant access to information and means no more looking around for historical data and no more long waiting for inspector and expert reports to make critical asset-related decisions. GE Energy will soon deploy Rhythm’s menu driven-inspection (MDI) to its engine inspectors for sharing information with experts located worldwide. GE Energy expects to more than double the productivity of its inspections while achieving superior quality.

Conclusion

The target for the inspection industry is to double the productivity of some everyday inspection tasks. Technology will play a key role in mitigating the effects of the labor shortage in the NDT inspection industry resulting from strong demand.