USPI-NL, the Dutch standards body held its annual member meeting earlier this year in Amersfoort. USPI director Paul Van Exel and Anders Thostrup (Shell and USPI chair) kicked off the event with a review of recent activity, in particular the flagship Cfihos* project. Cfihos originated in Shell where it has been in use since 2004 and is now in V1.2. It was successfully deployed in the Mimosa OGI use case 1 (information handover) and membership now includes BP, Total, Amec/FW, Petrofac, L&T, Datum 360, PhusionIM and Intergraph. Transition to an ISO standard is slotted for 2017/18. Cfihos has achieved critical mass in participation, now it needs critical mass in usage!
A ‘safari’ visit to engineer CB&I allowed Cfihos to be seen from the EPC viewpoint and compared with some 20 other handover requirements. There is a huge difference in the quality and volume of handover specs. These can be a vague entreaty to ‘use ISO 15926’ or a detailed 400 page document. Cfihos lies between these extremes and is thought to addresses most owner operators’ needs. Meanwhile, USPI and POSC/Caesar continue with maintenance of ISO 15926-4 and are working on document classification and metadata for inclusion in 15926 although ‘funding remains an issue.’
Although Vic Samuel (Chevron) is on the IOGP standards committee (ISC), he recognizes that it is hard to persuade his company to actually use standards. The ISC is working to improve standards’ effectiveness with a set of operator priorities and to coordinate standards organizations’ activity. To date industry has adopted relatively few information management standards but the EPIM ILAP and Cfihos are seen as likely quick wins.
Peter Whittal outlined BP’s approach to project and asset information flow. This involves a phased handover of quality info during build along with reporting and visualization of 3D model involving ‘60-70 systems,’ working from a central information store for document and tag management. All of which must be up and running at startup. BP ‘avoids chaos’ with a class library of the same terminology and data for use throughout. The system (actually the Mimosa OIIE) was delivered as a proof of concept in 2015 with help from Bentley, SAP and OSISoft and is said to have ‘a lot in common’ with Cfihos (See also Oil IT Journal N° 5 2015.)
Josh Vincent (Chevron) provided a progress report on the alignment of industry reference data libraries from BP, Chevron and Shell. These are currently not aligned so the plan is for ‘minimal’ additions to Cfihos to support all three. So far a ‘philosophy’ of alignment has emerged. A discussion ensued as to the real work involved here. The Fiatech Jord completion effort was evaluated at a notional cost of ‘around $1.5 billion dollars, spread over a 20-year period’ (Oil IT Journal May 2014). Indeed legacy standards work has seen ‘orders of magnitude’ more effort than Cfihos. The hope/expectation is that Cfihos can achieve a lightweight mapping with a realistic amount of work.
* USPI-NL’s Capital facilities information hand-over standard.
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