Thought Leadership

Published by: Upstream Mag, written by: Davide Ghilotti, Breaking News Editor. Feb 2026

US EPC contractor KBR tells Upstream how Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) analysis is helping operators minimise and mitigate downtime

The increasing complexity of offshore oil and gas projects is creating new challenges for operators as they seek to extend production uptime, minimise losses and improve efficiency of their facilities.

Whether growing output from ageing production hubs, sequencing operations from different interconnected facilities, or planning new structures in harsh, remote environments, operators today are faced with mounting challenges that threaten both production output as well as financial performance.

While the nature of the problems may be different from project to project, the effects are common: equipment failure, production losses, downtime.

“We’re seeing a clear shift from RAM being a tick‑box at the end of a project to being used right at the beginning to steer the design,” says KBR reliability manager Emily Bridge.

All of this can impact the economic sustainability of a project, at a time when operators are laser-focused on capital spending.

US EPC contractor KBR is bringing its Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) analysis offering to tackle these issues head-on.

RAM analysis is widely used in the oil and gas and other industries to predict an asset’s productive ability and identify ways to improve it.

On average, offshore operators lose around 8% of production to unplanned downtime, with 60% of that unplanned downtime related to equipment, according to KBR. Mitigating that can deliver critical value.

“All the easy stuff's kind of been done. We're now at the much harder facilities,” Emily Bridge, reliability manager at KBR, tells Upstream. “Things are much more marginal. They're heavier, more remote, need more processing”

Over the years, KBR has built experience in providing RAM analysis to diverse facilities ranging from fixed platforms to production gathering systems, FLNG and FPSOs.

RAM helps operators really answer the question, says Bridge, of “how much product you're actually going to make based on this facility with this configuration, with this operating scenario.”

From complexity to constraint

In today’s capex-constrained world, operators are increasingly having to grapple with how reliably and efficiently their oil and gas can be produced.

Project complexity is rising. New developments are tied into existing offshore hubs, where legacy equipment, fixed maintenance schedules and historical operating practices limit flexibility.

Elsewhere, operators are pushing ageing facilities beyond their original design life, extracting new barrels while deferring major capital spend.

At the same time, greenfield projects are moving into more remote and harsher environments, with heavier, more corrosive fluids and greater processing

requirements.

Bridge describes projects today as “no longer simple, standalone facilities. You’re often looking at multiple assets interacting with each other, and any disruption in one part of the system has a knock‑on impact elsewhere,” she says.

“Overlaying that complexity is economic pressure. With capex and opex under tight control as commodity prices dwindle, operators want to achieve high availability and strong cash flow without over‑engineering or excessive redundancy.”

“Availability targets are often baked into project economics at an early stage, but,” Bridge warns, “those targets are not always grounded in reality. In the past, many upstream projects just assumed 95% availability and carried that number through the economics,” she says. “That doesn’t hold anymore.”

Taking RAM forward to project planning

RAM analysis has traditionally been treated as a late‑stage verification exercise: a way to confirm near the end of design, when most critical decisions had been made, that a project met its availability target.

“We’re seeing a clear shift from RAM being a tick‑box at the end of a project to being used right at the beginning to steer the design, “Bridge says.

By bringing RAM into pre‑concept, concept and FEED stages, KBR uses it as a tool to explore what configuration, operational setup and level of redundancy make sense to maximise a projects performance.

The greatest leverage for RAM comes early in the process, when changes are still relatively easy to make. KBR builds models that test how different design and operational choices play out in practice.

As such, it is used to more precisely spell out how much product the facility will deliver based on a set configuration and operational setup.

One recurring issue KBR has seen is maintenance activities that appear routine on paper but have outsized production impacts.

In one specific offshore project, pigging operations — where gadgets or scrapers are used for pipeline maintenance purposes — between an offshore facility and an onshore plant were treated as standard maintenance.

When KBR modelled the frequency and impact, it found that pigging alone accounted for more than a 10% annual production loss in that case.

“Everyone thought it was manageable,” Bridge says. “But when you add it up over a year, it was equivalent to losing more than a month of production.”

In another instance, regarding design of an FPSO project with onboard compression, KBR assessed different compressor train configurations —modelling from a single large unit to multiple smaller machines operating in parallel.

The availability difference between those options ranged from 2%–5%, depending on configuration, it found. In production terms, that equates to one-to-two weeks of lost output per year.

“These aren’t abstract numbers,” Bridge says. “When you frame it like that, the decision becomes very tangible.”

Detailed engineering and operations

As projects move into detailed design, RAM models incorporate input including vendor data, spare parts strategies, turnaround schedules and restart times, allowing teams to understand how the facility will behave once it is running.

This is particularly important for interconnected developments, where new capacity is added to existing infrastructure.

RAM can explore if turnarounds should be aligned or staggered, and what equipment might be required to maintain continuity of production.

“You see how upstream and downstream facilities interact, and where problems can propagate,” says Bridge.

The focus is also shifting further down in the asset lifecycle. Here, RAM is being used to identify bottlenecks, chronic failures and operational practices that reduce availability.

In one instance, where KBR updated RAM models for a group of FPSOs’operations, it identified practices — such as synchronising filter changes for maintenance convenience — that caused predictable production hits.

By quantifying the production loss, the operators can more readily justify actions that deliver specific gains.

“Sometimes people just keep going with known problems,” Bridge says. “RAM gives you the numbers to say, ‘this is costing us 2% a year, every year’ and that gets management attention.”

As operators push for greater digital integration, RAM is increasingly intersecting with historical performance data and analytics tools. KBR is exploring how models can be informed by real operating data to optimise areas such as spares holding and maintenance strategies.

At the same time, because ultimately everything depends on how the facilities are operated, KBR stresses that experience and operator engagement remains central to the process.

Understanding response times, constraints and operational intent requires knowledgeable personnel with experience in running the facilities – something that cannot be automated.

“You need people who’ve seen these facilities operate,” Bridge says. “Otherwise, it’s very easy to end up with garbage in, garbage out.”