Why delayed intervention is becoming Asia's biggest reliability risk

The refiners best positioned for success will be those that turn asset condition data into timely decisions.

Across Asia's oil and gas sector, identifying and addressing degradation before it impacts production is central to reducing maintenance costs and extending asset life.

Asian oil and gas operators are navigating one of the most complex operating environments in decades. From mature refining hubs in South Korea and Singapore to expanding oil and gas operations across Southeast Asia, operators are under growing pressure to maximise performance from existing assets whilst maintaining high utilisation.

This pressure is amplified by ambitious national energy targets such as Indonesia’s goal to raise crude oil production to 1 million barrels per day by 2030 and India's crude oil demand projected to approach 6 million barrels per day in 2026.

At the same time, operators are also being asked to do more with assets that were often designed for very different operating conditions. Globally, the average refinery is between 35 and 40 years old but APAC presents a particularly complex picture, combining ageing infrastructure in markets such as Japan and Australia with newer facilities in China and India.

Adding to this, refiners have traditionally operated on four-to-six-year turnaround cycles but are now increasingly looking to extend those intervals whilst maintaining operational availability above 97%. As assets are pushed to greater limits for longer periods of time, delayed intervention is increasingly becoming a reliability risk rather than a maintenance inefficiency.

Operational realities
Asian operators are dealing with issues including sour water corrosion, corrosive condensates, and unexpected sour service exposure, a particular challenge in Southeast Asia's tropical climate. Often these issues are experienced in equipment that was not originally designed for those conditions. These challenges are becoming more acute as operators seek to extend the life of existing assets and maximise output in response to ambitious production targets.

Corrosion, erosion, and efficiency losses are not typically sudden events. More often, they develop steadily over years, making them difficult to prioritise against competing, often more urgent, demands that focus on avoiding immediate downtime risks. When left unaddressed, however, slow-acting issues can shorten asset life, reduce throughput and increase the cost and complexity of future maintenance interventions.

The decision gap behind delayed intervention
Most operators already collect extensive inspection data and condition information. The bigger challenge is ensuring those insights are acted on before they become major reliability problems.

As experienced engineers retire and technical expertise becomes harder to retain, this task is becoming more difficult. Integrity concerns also compete with production targets and budget pressures. In practice, corrosion engineers, turnaround teams, and budget holders often view the same issue through different lenses, making it harder to reach timely intervention decisions. The result is that known degradation mechanisms can remain unresolved until they become larger reliability problems.

Operators must also recognise that degradation does not develop uniformly across assets. Two units performing the same function can experience very different damages depending on their operating history, feedstock mix, and process conditions. Even similar fired heaters, vessels, or columns can behave differently over time.

This is particularly important in Asia as operators extend asset life and adapt facilities to changing operating requirements. Reliability strategies are increasingly shifting beyond periodic inspections towards a deeper understanding of how operating conditions, inspection findings, and field observations interact over time. Risk-based inspection programmes can reduce turnaround scope by as much as 50%, helping operators focus resources on the areas of greatest integrity risk.

Combining inspection data with a detailed understanding of asset-specific operating conditions also helps preserve critical operational knowledge that might otherwise be lost as experienced personnel leave the workforce. By capturing insights that have traditionally resided with experienced engineers, operators can identify deterioration trends earlier and avoid maintenance decisions based on generic assumptions that may overlook emerging risks.

What early intervention looks like in practice 
The commercial impact of early intervention can be seen through one example in Kazakhstan. Whilst every operating environment is different, the Tengiz experience is relevant for Asian operators facing the same core challenge: How to act on degradation evidence early enough to reduce shutdown uncertainty and future maintenance scope.

The Tengiz field is one of the world's largest and most complex sour gas processing environments, containing approximately 26 billion barrels of oil and gas reserves. Process equipment throughout the facility is exposed to highly corrosive conditions, creating significant integrity challenges.

Faced with recurring integrity challenges affecting critical process vessels, the operator moved away from repeated short-term repairs and adopted a longer-term maintenance strategy focused on understanding degradation mechanisms and addressing root causes before they could affect reliability.

By completing engineering assessments and inspection work ahead of shutdown activities, the operator reduced uncertainty during execution, cut turnaround duration and achieved significant cost savings. Long-term performance was also demonstrated through inspection results over multiple operating cycles, with assets remaining free from damage or defects years after installation.

Building reliability for the future
As governments across Asia pursue ambitious energy targets, operators will increasingly depend on existing infrastructure to meet demand. As assets operate longer and under changing conditions, the cost of delayed intervention will only rise.

The refiners best positioned for long-term success will be those that turn asset condition data into timely decisions, reduce repeat maintenance scope, and keep critical units online when demand leaves little room for disruption.