September 22, 2020 | 2 minute read
Improving asset performance is a universal goal for today's process industries, where the performance of systems in all industrial sectors is increasingly coming under critical inspection. This is particularly so within oil and gas, and petrochemical production, where global energy demand is continually increasing, amidst the pressure to operate these facilities more cost-efficiently.
Central to these process assets is mission-critical rotating equipment, and specifically centrifugal pumps, which represent a significant proportion of the equipment found in oil and gas production facilities, and most industrial processing operations. Keeping these systems up and running is vital to maintaining process flow. The failure of a mission-critical or supporting pump, necessary to offshore or onshore extraction, or midstream and downstream distribution, refining or storage, can interrupt production resulting in costly losses in product-stream revenue, as well as potential emission violations that jeopardize plant operating licenses.
Large industrial processing facilities, such as for oil and gas, or petrochemical production, may have thousands of pumps and other rotating equipment in place, many of which are original equipment installed when the plant was opened, possibly 40 to 50 years earlier. Consequently, maintaining robust and effective maintenance and upgrade of these pumps, and securing their reliability, is increasingly crucial as the rotary equipment continues to age.
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