Digitalisation is the key

The LNG market continues to grow at pace and plays an essential role in tackling the ongoing energy trilemma. DNV’s 2022 Energy Transition Outlook estimates that natural gas will be the single largest energy source by 2048.

With energy security a key priority globally, floating LNG (FLNG) and FSRUs in particular are viewed as key players to support this demand due to storage and porta-bility characteristics. LNG also offers lower environmental impact in relation to coal or oil, so is an attractive solution in providing a proportion of the world’s heating and electricity generation requirements.

However, new and existing storage, transport, and downstream facilities must be ready for technological developments. In that respect, digitalisation can help to ensure the LNG supply chain is robust enough to support a greener, safer, and more secure future while also ensuring that the facilities themselves are fit for day-to-day use.

Why are countries constructing FSRUs?

When compared with onshore facilities, FSRUs are quicker to build – a particular-ly important point given that global demand for energy security is immediate. Expediency is very much a consideration for governments when putting plans in place for the development of their respective countries’ energy infrastructure.

There are, however, operational parameters that must be considered for the successful deployment for FSRUs to ensure that they are safe for operation.

Wind levels, wave height, and general weather factors are a concern with visibility and seasonal variations also having to be taken into account. Equipment reliability and the LNG tanker size, demurrage conditions, sloshing potential, and berthing restrictions are other aspects to be examined. The risk of each of these factors can be understood through statistical analysis.

For FSRU operations, effective risk management can, however, only be achieved when both the stochastic variation of all risk factors and their potential interdependencies are jointly considered.

DNV’s reliability availability and maintainability (RAM) analysis software, Total Asset Review and Optimisation (TARO), uses Monte-Carlo simulation-based tools in support of the LNG sector. In the specific case of FSRUs, it is used to produce fully dynamic probabilistic illustrations of operations to substantiate the robustness of proposed commercial operating model(s).

The method highlights risks associated to production, reliability, and demurrage to the selected model and what alternative options are available. It can also be used to assess the design of critical safety and control equipment, actively demonstrating that LNG transferring operations can be conducted in a safe and resilient manner across multiple supply chain stakeholders.

TARO, as a quantitative digital forecasting tool, provides a full risk profile, which can support LNG tanker delivery schedule design and aiding in pre-FEED and FEED stages from a process design perspective.

This can be achieved through:

• Optimisation of berthing design and operation.
• Buffer storage provision.
• And/or quantification of the effect of different equipment and process system con-figurations via sensitivity cases.

Of particular interest within the ongoing LNG market movements that seek to address security of supply concerns is that TARO can be used to de-risk any changes or updates that operating assets might be considering in relation to current operations.

FSRUs and importing terminals – Europe in focus

RAM tools have been introduced to help digitalise newly-constructed FSRU structures and LNG importing terminals across the continent.

Italy

Earlier this year, it was announced that Offshore LNG Toscana’s (OLT) facility in Italy would be at full capacity until 2027. LNG slots of 155 000 m³ were offered for the regasification capacity, currently authorised of 3.75 billion m³/y. The facility, moored around 22 km from the Tuscan coast between Livorno and Pisa, is one of the Italian energy system’s most important infrastructure developments for the import of LNG.

As part of a project to assess the risks and challenges faced by OLT’s FSRU, a range of parameters that have an impact on the overall system performance over its lifetime were assessed. Terminal performance guidelines and associated contin-gency plans were subsequently able to be formed by all relevant stakeholders.

The relationship between terminal send-out efficiency and gas import volumes was quantified and it was found that efficiency is heavily reduced with increasing import requirements, mainly due to lower levels of equipment sparing at the FSRU as throughput increases. This led to the optimisation of the design configuration of topside facilities; overall performance was improved as key performance drivers and bot-tlenecks were identified and addressed.

The TARO models were also used to identify the significant operational and financial risk posed by LNG delivery schedule congestion, as a result of berthing slot disruption and tanker delays. As mitigation, the proposed ship sizes and storage volumes on the terminal were optimised to find acceptable trade-offs between demurrage hours, zero send-out time, and efficiency.

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