South Hook LNG Terminal Ensures Reliable, Affordable Energy to the United Kingdom

Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is a key fuel source to ensure reliable, dispatchable power when intermittent renewable sources, such as wind and solar, aren’t available. A strong supply chain that supports an uninterrupted flow of LNG to regasification terminals is critical.

As one of the largest terminals in Europe, South Hook LNG Terminal Company (SHLNG) meets approximately 20% of the UK’s daily natural gas needs. It is the final stage of a fully integrated LNG supply chain, which stretches from the gas fields of Qatar to the deep waters of west Wales.

SHLNG focuses on a data-driven asset strategy and a proactive approach to maintain key assets and reduce costs.  Leveraging GE Digital’s expertise and Asset Performance Management (APM) solution, SHLNG has eliminated 17% of its maintenance tasks and optimized 73% of its remaining proactive maintenance tasks across the facility.

Creating an Asset Strategy and Promoting Adoption

Thousands of assets are needed to run an LNG terminal of this size and scale.  A phased approach to developing a comprehensive maintenance program to optimize equipment availability, reliability, and cost efficiency was already underway. 

This included a process to enrich and complete maintenance data to ensure streamlined maintenance workflows – from identification of work through planning and scheduling, to work close out and reporting.

With a focus on creating a positive environment for internal adoption, the company delivered the agreed upon project scope to achieve the full benefits of its APM investment, including:

• Ensuring the accuracy and quality of the assets master data for the existing facilities.
• Setting priorities by ranking the equipment through Asset Criticality Assessment (ACA).
• Improving reliability and asset integrity by identifying the proper preventative maintenance workflow for the existing facilities.
• Focusing on system-level improvements and on methods to establish their existence, their degree of sophistication and their effectiveness.

In a multi-phased approach, the joint SHLNG and GE Digital team completed:

• Phase 1: Asset Register Data Verification to establish parent-child relationships between assets. These relationships help identify which assets require maintenance, and which assets are connected. The reduces downtime and streamlines the maintenance workflow for plant technicians.
• Phase 2: Asset Criticality Assessment (ACA) to identify the key systems and equipment and provide visibility of those systems and assets that are most critical to the success of the overall business.
• Phase 3: Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Strategy Development to identify the events (e.g., failure, passing of time) that trigger maintenance (e.g., inspection repair, replacement). This ensures an efficient and rational process of applying RCM techniques and generating recommendations that are converted to maintenance strategies across critical assets.

Improved Risk Management Workflow Reduces Costs

During the project time, the team developed asset strategies that enabled SHLNG to benefit from the optimized maintenance program. GE Digital helped generate the related tasks that are integrated with RCM Analysis, in addition to overall support and guidance on APM methodology and procedures.

Based on this systematic and accurate criticality assessment, the equipment priorities system was established, leading to an optimized preventative maintenance program for all safety and business critical equipment.

The shift to Condition Based Maintenance eliminates equipment overhaul based on fixed time interval (with an improvement in effectiveness and great savings in costs).  The overall reduction in the number and frequency of routine tasks, including invasive tasks which could upset stable systems, has enabled SHLNG to eliminate 17% of maintenance tasks and optimize 73% of proactive tasks. 

Ensuring a Continuous Loop of Improvement

To sustain and improve the maintenance and reliability program, various work processes, including those for Mechanical Integrity (MI), Barrier Management (BM) and Safety Instrumented System (SIS), along with RCM and ACA, have been adopted as part of the SHLNG asset ecosystem. These processes help lower costs, increase output, and ensure regulatory compliance. This approach provides an integrated and collaborative environment which ensures information is continually shared across the team.