The use of a reliability based design philosophy relative to Oil County Tubular Goods is becoming more important as operators continue to push the limits of materials and equipment by driving than into ever environments and ever more unusual operating scenarios. The use of allowable or working stress design no longer serves the designer in these unusual situations. The means of determining the risk or reliability of the operating scenario is critical, from a safety viewpoint as well as from an optimized design viewpoint.

Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA) provides the necessary tool for the optimization of a design while quantifying the associated risk of the design for a particular scenario. QRA can and does go beyond the conventional load combinations and standard operations. It is a powerful tool for allowing the operator to "put the pieces together differently".

In this paper, the QRA technology is discussed not only for design but analyzing problems and scenarios which is not the norm. It discusses how the technology can be applied on out of the ordinary operations and how these operations which are considered by the Industiy as unacceptable or unsafe can be achievable if one knows what the risk is and what is driving that risk.

Although QRA and total system reliability / assessment is in its infancy in drilling and well operations, in the years to come it will become one of the prominent technologies of the Oil and Gas Industry.

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