Applicability of Performance Measures for Production Performance Analysis in Oil and Gas Industries Including Lower Carbon Activities

Production performance analysis includes methods for predicting production availability, to identify bottlenecks and assess different alternatives in design. Such methods have a tradition for use in the oil and gas industry and are recently also considered for use in renewable energy industries. However, despite principles generally being transferable across different industries, some methods might need adjustment to be applicable for the range of renewable energy. The need for adjustment is also reflected in the extended scope of ISO 20815, where the next revision then will aim at giving guidance to production assurance and reliability management in oil and gas industry including lower carbon energy.
Some of the relevant performance measures for various lower carbon activities are addressed in this paper. The objective is to consider the applicability of existing measures outlined in ISO 20815 (2018), by discussing practical implications and attempts to establish definitions that can be applied across all industries, while addressing nuances needed to reflect unique aspects of each industry. For example, production availability is generally defined with reference to planned or potential production. In the oil and gas industry, the reference has typically been given by production profiles. Production profiles as a reference would also be meaningful in industries like wind and solar, but they are more volatile and must be handled somewhat differently, indicating a need to calculate production availability differently from the current standard.
Selected industry cases are used as examples to demonstrate the feasibility and coherence of performance measures in production assurance analyses within various energy industries.

Keywords: Performance measures, Production availability, Standardization, Renewable energy.