This document describes the concept of production assurance within the systems and operations associated with exploration drilling, exploitation, processing and transport of petroleum, petrochemical and natural gas resources. This document covers upstream (including subsea), midstream and downstream facilities, petrochemical and associated activities. It focuses on production assurance of oil and gas production, processing and associated activities and covers the analysis of reliability and maintenance of the components. This includes a variety of business categories and associated systems/equipment in the oil and gas value chain. Production assurance addresses not only hydrocarbon production, but also associated activities such as drilling, pipeline installation and subsea intervention.

This document provides processes and activities, requirements and guidelines for systematic management, effective planning, execution and use of production assurance and reliability technology. This is to achieve cost-effective solutions over the life cycle of an asset development project structured around the following main elements:

— production assurance management for optimum economy of the facility through all of its life cycle phases, while also considering constraints arising from health, safety, environment, and quality;

— planning, execution and implementation of reliability technology;

— application of reliability and maintenance data;

— reliability-based technology development, design and operational improvement.

The IEC 60300-3 series addresses equipment reliability and maintenance performance in general.

This document designates 12 processes, of which seven are defined as core production assurance processes and addressed in this document. The remaining five processes are denoted as interacting processes and are outside the scope of this document. The interaction of the core production assurance processes with these interacting processes, however, is within the scope of this document as the information flow to and from these latter processes is required to ensure that production assurance requirements can be fulfilled.

The only requirement mandated by this document is the establishment and execution of the production assurance programme (PAP). It is important to reflect the PAP in the overall project management in the project for which it applies.

This document recommends that the listed processes and activities be initiated only if they can be considered to add value.