A foundation of data

The LNG industry has changed over the last few years, driven by energy constraints and also aiming toward more sustainable, lower-carbon sources of firm capacity power. To transition with these changing dynamics, the LNG import market has developed integrated LNG receiving and regasification projects. These integrations typically include an LNG mooring link (floating or land-based), LNG storage, regasification, and associated power generation. These integrations are ideal projects to help lower the cost of gas supply and electric power for constrained electrical markets, such as island grids or for geographies with otherwise limited native fuel resources and infrastructure.

These integrated projects are located on the shores of mainland European countries such as Spain and Germany, as well as in Wales, Malta, India, South Korea, the Dominican Republic, Japan, and China. In many of these projects, LNG is viewed as a more cost-effective alternative than older, inefficient, and carbon-intensive energy sources. In addition to economic savings, it delivers a step-change improvement in carbon reduction.

Maintenance of gas and power generation assets represent a significant ongoing cost

Regasification and power generation facilities are large investments in complex inter-connected systems, and typically expect a useful life of over 30 years.

Regasification and power generation asset maintenance represents significant ongoing cost. It is important to ensure that performance is optimised, balancing expenditures and availability. If maintenance spend is too low, a company might seem to be saving money; however, these maintenance savings can easily be negated by the value of lost production. To mitigate this, companies develop maintenance strategies and multi-year plans to ensure optimisation of their maintenance activities and reliability performance over the life of the asset. Data shows that companies with optimised maintenance strategies have a significant competitive advantage over their peers; however, this optimisation can be challenging with interconnecting elements.

A solution for this challenge is a detailed benchmark of individual production units against worldwide peers.

This robust benchmarking analysis includes the following main objectives:

1. To establish the actual performance of the assessed process or production unit relative to relevant peers.
2. To quantify the cash value and nature of the performance gaps between the assessed process or production unit in comparison to relevant peers.
3. To understand the impact of the inputs that relate to performance, compare the inputs of the assessed organisation compared to high performing peer organisations, and identify the inter-relationships between management controllable inputs and activities.
4. To help clients establish key performance metrics, adjust action plans, refine performance targets, and identify actions that can be taken to improve performance.

In benchmarking, production and process units are grouped with peers of similar processes, and regasification or power plants can be examples of such process or production units. A robust benchmarking analysis of reliability and maintenance places participating units into performance quartiles. For example, total cost of maintenance is defined as the sum of the maintenance expenditure and the value of lost production associated with breakdowns or planned maintenance outages. Using the data, the units are normalised by the plant replacement value (PRV).

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Read the article online at: https://www.lngindustry.com/special-reports/12102023/a-foundation-of-data/