According to a survey conducted by the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP)’s Standards Committee, the average upstream oil and gas company has 816 internal company specifications.

These include technical specifications, company standards, and individualized design and engineering practices – all prepared by the company itself for its own repeated use. In some of the companies surveyed (accounting for more than one-third of the world’s oil and gas production), such technical specifications total more than 2,000.

The committee’s newly published report, “Benchmarking on the use of internal technical specifications and external standards by some oil & gas companies,” points to this as a situation for some concern. According to the report, large numbers of specifications require a lot of company resources to maintain and to keep current. Moreover, “Large groups of company specifications for mechanical equipment (including rotating machinery, tanks and vessels, piping, and valves), maintenance and inspection, electrical, instrumentation, HSE and process disciplines may suggest lack of, or inappropriate level of, external standards in these areas.

The result is that companies with many specifications and standards invest more people’s time to create these guidelines than they would to evaluate and implement external standards.

Ironically, most internal specifications quote external standards, the report finds. “In total, 5,237 different standards titles have been recorded from eight of the survey respondents … These standards come from as many as 132 different standards-making organizations.”

And, despite affirmations of a great interest in international standardization and potential benefits – including cost reduction, reconciling technical differences, and minimizing the number of company specifications – the survey also revealed a significant disparity in the level of participation for operating companies in external standardization work. The report found that, “Some majors carry a heavy burden, while other operating companies are happy to make use of the standards and harvest their benefits, but they are not at all present in the standards development process.”

The report concludes with suggested actions to involve more operating companies in developing international standards.

The committee argues that resources currently dedicated to developing and maintaining company specifications could be better shared with others in developing international standards, particularly in areas where international standards activities are limited or non-existent. And further, if company specifications largely refer to external standards, project developers might have a clear basis on which to build their needs and could achieve more.

Commenting on the survey, OGP Standards Manager Alf Reidar Johansen said the findings bear out the association’s commitment to universality. “We have always argued the benefits of global standards used locally worldwide, and this report argues in favor of that approach.”

The report is available to download from the publications page of OGP’s website at: www.ogp.org.uk

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