CAN Group - Keeping Integrity in Sight 

Extending the operational life of a portfolio of aged North Sea assets continues to be an ongoing challenge; doing so without compromising quality, safety or integrity is critical to ensuring that these assets can continue to operate reliably for years to come.

Recent world developments have brought sharp focus onto the North Sea, and the wider UKCS, to drive self-sufficiency in terms of energy needs, both in the short and long term. The compounding effects of the global pandemic and crisis in Ukraine, coupled with ageing North Sea assets and infrastructure, means that long-term asset health and integrity is a key target for the oil and gas industry to maintain production levels safely and efficiently, and to reduce the requirement for energy importation as far as is possible.

As a market-leading provider in life of asset integrity services, CAN Group ensures that asset safety, integrity, and certainty remains at the heart of reliable and efficient operations.

Across its 35-year tenure, CAN Group has evolved into one of the UK’s leading life-of-asset integrity service providers and as such, is a key contributor to the plant, personal and collective safety for its clients and the wider energy industry both in the UK and globally.

CAN Group’s continued commitment to the provision of an unrivalled range of integrity related services has led the company to hold one of the most comprehensive UKAS accreditation scopes as a Type C Inspection Body in the Oil and Gas industry, as well as being the first company in the UK to be accredited for Integrity Management to ISO 17020.

This accreditation status assures clients of independence and impartiality across its extensive service range; uniquely placing the business in a position to deliver the full range of risk-based asset integrity and inspection management services across the entire asset life cycle. Integrity truly is at the core of CAN’s business – keeping sight of both plant integrity and the integrity of the services it offers.

Importance of Data

There has been a rapid increase in the development and uptake of digital solutions for managing asset integrity over the last few years from tablet-based reporting and cloud-based Integrity Management Systems through to artificial intelligence and digital twin technology, to help reduce risk and maximise value.

Meaningful data is at the core of asset reliability; Inspection data (including fabric condition), collected and reported in real-time through CAN Group’s proprietary tablet inspection system CANtab™ (and often uploaded to ENGAGE™ - CAN Group’s cloud-based solution for Integrity Management) provides a platform for maximising data value. The efficient and effective management of data helps to refine the inspection planning process and ensures the most appropriate techniques and resources are selected based on various factors including risk, probability of detection, material type, configuration and access.

In a world of ageing assets, many with limited productive lives remaining, data driven decisions become ever more critical in order to maximise the economic recovery. CAN Group has been at the forefront of this with its “Find and Fix”, “Find and Arrest” and Dropped Object Prevention concepts which, coupled with CANtab and ENGAGE, are yielding significant integrity gains for their clients. Utilising pre-agreed criteria with the client, normally where the required mitigation is quick to apply, CAN’s Inspection teams own the problem and ensures suitable mitigation is applied at the point of inspection – whether that is a permanent or “stop-gap” fix. Their bespoke digital solutions allow all the relevant details regarding the applied mitigation to be captured immediately and then made available to onshore Integrity Engineers.

However, for this approach to be effective integrity is key. With limited resources any corrective work must clearly demonstrate risk reduction and often this is addressing issues such as “scab” corrosion which requires very localised Fabric Maintenance. The business models of traditional painting contractors are largely based around painting significant areas and this approach doesn’t always sit neatly with a Risk Based approach.

With ongoing capital investment in new equipment and emerging technologies to bring greater efficiency and cost optimisation to its operations, CAN Group fully embraces innovation and firmly believes that by working smarter, there’s so much more potential for improvements and increased efficiencies across the industry.

However, it’s important to remember that although innovation has its place, having a robust understanding of the fundamentals of asset integrity is key. 

CAN Group’s team of personnel are integral to this; an empowered, integrated and highly experienced workforce who continuously provide high quality services focussed on safety, integrity and certainty.

CAN Group is an established global provider of life of asset integrity services with our business steams CAN, ENGTEQ and VENTEQ providing innovative Engineering, Integrity Management, Inspection, QA/QC and Maintenance Solutions to the energy industry worldwide. For more information visit www.cangroup.net

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