Subsea drilling and wellhead load monitoring systems in the North Sea: A case study using a well access management system (WAMS)

Abstract

In the last decade, the monitoring systems have become a crucial component for the drilling and oil wellhead operations. The importance of such systems has been magnified by oil companies and the regulatory bodies after the Gulf of Mexico incident on Deepwater Horizon rig that took place on 20th of April 2010 in which eleven crewmen were killed. The data obtained by the monitoring systems can provide significant advisory data to assist the operators to mitigate the various risks during the operations and to reduce the maintenance cost of equipment. In this paper, an overview of recent studies on the existing monitoring systems for the drilling and oil wellhead operations technical challenges faced by operators and the benefits of monitoring systems has been presented......