Offshore oil and gas platforms have a design life of about 25 years whereas the techniques and tools
used for managing their data are constantly evolving. Therefore, data captured about platforms during
their lifetimes will be in varying forms. Additionally, due to the many stakeholders involved with a facility
over its life cycle, information representation of its components varies. These challenges make data
integration difficult. Over the years, data integration technology application in the oil and gas industry
has focused on meeting the needs of asset life cycle stages other than decommissioning. This is the
case because most assets are just reaching the end of their design lives.
Currently, limited work has
been done on integrating life cycle data for offshore decommissioning purposes, and reports by industry
stakeholders underscore this need.
This thesis proposes a method for the integration of the common data types relevant in oil and gas
decommissioning. The key features of the method are that it (i) ensures semantic homogeneity using
knowledge representation languages (Semantic Web) and domain specific reference data (ISO 15926);
and (ii) allows stakeholders to continue to use their current applications. Prototypes of the framework
have been implemented using open source software applications and performance measures made.
The work of this thesis has been motivated by the business case of reusing offshore decommissioning
waste items. The framework developed is generic and can be applied whenever there is a need to
integrate and query disparate data involving oil and gas assets. The prototypes presented show how
the data management challenges associated with assessing the suitability of decommissioned offshore
facility items for reuse can be addressed. The performance of the prototypes show that significant time
and effort is saved compared to the state-of‐the‐art solution. The ability to do this effectively and
efficiently during decommissioning will advance the oil the oil and gas industry’s transition toward a
circular economy and help save on cost
