As we reported last year, Cfihos, the Netherlands-headquartered USPI NL’s Capital facilities information standard initiative shares the same owner-operator members as the UK-based International oil and gas operator’s association’s JIP33 . The objectives of both Cfihos and JIP 33 also overlap to a considerable degree. Cfihos deals with information handover, JIP33 with procurement specifications for the upstream construction supply chain. Speaking at the 2019 USPI NL Annual Management meeting in Amersfoort, NL, Shell’s Anders Thostrup, who is both USPI chair and vice-chair of the IOGP’s instrumentation standards subcommittee, announced that a handover of Cfihos to IOGP was pretty much a done deal. The transfer is still dependent on management committee approval and on agreement on the treatment of Cfihos-owned intellectual property.
The move may have been a surprise for some Cfihos members. Cfihos has dominated USPI activity for last few years. Cfihos has around 50 member organizations including oils, EPCs and software vendors. IOGP is more of an oils-only organization. The two approaches also differ. Cfihos is as an attempt to simplify the decades of work represented by the ISO 15926 constellation of information standards and to provide a vehicle for overarching information handover during a construction project. JIP33 on the other hand produces equipment-class specific narrative documents that leverage work from the American Petroleum Institute and (apparently) ISO 14224. Phase 3 of JIP33, launched early this year to develop member-requested standards for subsea valves, air-cooled heat exchangers and diesel emergency generators. The JIP33 standards documents are available online.
Thostrup explained his approach to bringing the organizations closer together. The different standards bodies tend to work in bubbles with poor communication. Owner operators are starting to take their role more seriously, witness the IOGP’s vision for information standards for documents and data in the upstream and a common voice for operators. The IOGP ISSC is orchestrating data standardization through memorandums of understanding with EPIM STI (Norway) CFIHOS and also, Mimosa, PoscCaesar and DEXPI.
Announcing the start of JIP33 Phase 3, steering committee chair Richard Mortimer stated, [with regard to upstream supply chain efficiency], “There is certainly room for improvement. In recent years, 75% of large E&P projects exceeded budget by 50%, with scheduling over-runs of 40%. This has to stop. Standardizing procurement specifications is the way forward*.” Already there is linkage between Cfihos and JIP33. In one of the latest JIP33 publications, covering heat exchangers, the information requirements and deliverables are cross-published with Cfihos. We will be reporting from the latest (last?) Cfihos meeting which took place recently in Amersfoort, NL in our next issue.
* Similar-sounding statements were made some twenty years ago at the outset of the PCA/ISO 15926 work. Looking back at our report from the 1999 Plant Information Management event in The Hague, we see that at the time, plant information exchange was being proposed via the then novel XML protocol. Today, industry (for both JIP33 and Cfihos) seems to have reverted to good old Excel!
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