Knowledge Acquisition and Management for Operations in Offshore Oil & Gas Industry: An Approach Based on Systems Engineering

In order to produce Oil & Gas (O&G) final products, the O&G production processes will consist three main sequence sectors. The first is upstream, which consists of two sub-sectors are onshore and offshore, is responsible for exploration and production of crude oil and gas from fields to surface facilities for further processing to the pre-treated crude products. The second is midstream which is pertaining to the transportation of the upstream pre-treated crude oil and natural gas to downstream processing plants via transportation facilities. The last is downstream which is responsible for processing the pre-treated crude oil and gas to various domestic products.

The upstream sector is often the most important one in O&G industry because it can bring more profit than the other sectors. The revenue for 2023 of global O&G exploration and production is predicted to be $2,073,5B (IBIS World, 2023), ranked at the 8th on 10 of Global Biggest Industries. But it is also high risk and complex for management and operations, especially in offshore sector. With harsh environments, the operations of offshore O&G systems always contain higher potential incidents or accidents (Zubaidah, et al, 2016) than onshore production processes. Therefore, the safety and effectiveness in operations are always high challenges for offshore O&G productions (James, 2015).