According to the legislation of the Russian Federation in industrial safety, companies operating hazardous production facilities of oil pipeline transport have to ensure the safety of operated engineering devices and equipment. At the same time, technical regulations limit the range of equipment and materials that must be certified (have a declaration) to confirm the required safety level; the same technical regulations say that legal persons are entitled to implement voluntary conformity assessment systems for such equipment, appoint team members and introduce rules for carrying out such conformity assessments.
Following the above provisions, national oil and gas companies ensure quality control of equipment and materials requiring vendors to submit equipment certificates (declarations) and other permits obtained after mandatory conformity assessment procedures; moreover the companies actively use in-house systems of voluntary conformity assessment, set various corporate requirements to purchased equipment and to its producers. Oil and gas industry is committed to the idea of having a wide range of fair-trading, trusted counterparts able to ensure supplies of high-quality equipment. At that, equipment conformity assessment scope, rules and criteria may be substantially different across the oil and gas industry. Inconsistent requirements to equipment conformity assessment procedures (moreover, redundancy thereof) have a negative impact on business activity of the industry, both for equipment manufacturers and operators. In this regard, there is a need to establish harmonized approaches to conformity assessment of equipment, meeting the requirements of both oil and gas companies, and equipment manufacturers. Hence, it is important to define a set of certain vendor assessment and equipment quality control procedures. But it is equally important to create the best environment for operating equipment conformity assessment system, given the intrinsic specifics of oil pipeline transport activities. Such conformity assessment system will rely on the industry regulatory environment and will allow conducting the ongoing monitoring and accounting of equipment status, identifying gaps and assessing the expedience of measures taken to eliminate the cases of use of low-quality equipment at hazardous production facilities.
In this paper, the authors propose for consideration a mechanism for improving the effectiveness of equipment conformity assessment procedures matching them up with the quality management provisions and industry approaches derived from vast equipment quality control practice at oil pipeline transport facilities.
References
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2. Aralov O.V., Buyanov I.V., V'yunov S.I., Rublev A.A., Automatic control of processes for products conformity assessment applied in Transneft (In Russ.), Nauka i tehnologii truboprovodnogo transporta nefti i nefteproduktov = Science & Technologies: Oil and Oil Products Pipeline Transportation, 2018, no. 8(4), pp. 426–435.
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