World demand for oil and natural gas continues to increase, with ever-increasing technical challenges to finding new resources and to make more efficient the production of existing reserves. The technical challenges include drilling and production in offshore water depths exceeding 8,000 ft; production of high-temperature and high-pressure sour (HPHT) gas; production from formations with problematic highly deformable rock; new developments in the materials used to explore for and product new resources; and the aging and deterioration of equipment in older fields. Upstream projects also face close scrutiny as well as strict requirements from a variety of stakeholders, including interntional lenders, concerned with environmental, health, safety, and social impacts and benefits.
With over 40 years of experience analyzing complex projects and thousands of failures, Exponent is a leader in loss investigation and failure analysis in the petroleum industry, such as:
- Catastrophic equipment and material failures, corrosion and aging structures
- Root cause analysis (RCA) and Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA)
- Fitness for service evaluation
- Blowouts and explosions
- Offshore fixed and floating platform stability and integrity
- Drilling and workover incidents involving injuries and fatalities
- Human factors and analysis
- Oil and natural gas storage in salt caverns and abandoned reservoirs and aquifers
- Well and completion design
- Casing, tubing and drilling string analysis
- Threaded connection evaluation
- Environmental and social impact assessments of new and existing projects
- Environmental investigations of onshore and offshore produced water and drilling mud discharges and those involving NORM and saltwater/brine disposal
- Compliance with standards and regulations
- Risk assessment and reliability-based design
These investigations range from high loss disasters to small incidents for major national and international exploration and production companies.
Exponent has a wide range of in-house expertise that integrates the latest petroleum engineering, process, safety, risk, and environmental developments into our work. As a result, we can address everything from a small analysis to a large, complex, multi-disciplinary project. Exponent engineers and scientists regularly publish in leading technical journals and present at conferences, including Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), American Society of Mechanical Engineers, (ASME), American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). They chair American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) conference sessions, and provide peer review for journals such as Process Safety Progress, Journal of Petroleum Science & Engineering (JPSE), and Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries (JLPPI).