Energy companies are pressing CTRL+P on replacement parts

Posted: June 03, 2026

“Our turnaround window is usually six to eight weeks, at the most,” explained ExxonMobil’s Christopher Beeson on a recent podcast, when discussing the kind of routine maintenance that keeps refineries running smoothly. “So if we go into a [distillation] tower, and we find a tray that has 200 bubble caps on it, […] and we see 20 bubble caps that need to be replaced, we’ve got to do something quickly […] to get this unit back up and running on schedule.”

A bubble cap is not a complex component—it has no moving parts and is made of pieces of stamped steel. Ordering replacements from the manufacturer should be routine. Except, as Beeson says, “what happened in COVID was that a lot of these stamped steel companies went out of business, so the die to make these is gone now.”

What to do? Because of the piece-specific configuration of dies, sourcing a new manufacturer would likely take months. Meanwhile, the distillation tower would be either less performant or out of action entirely.

Issues like Beeson’s are longstanding in the energy sector, where assets are often in the field for decades. Beeson’s solution, however, has only recently become an option. He scanned the bubble cap, generating a digital model of it, and had the piece made with a 3D printer.

Over the last few years, additive manufacturing—the process of creating things with 3D printers—has matured significantly. The days when the technology was limited to flimsy plastics and prototyping are long gone. Construction firms are using printable concrete to build apartment blocks, while the combination of metal powders and new printing techniques have made it possible to produce extremely high-quality components, like rocket engines and even parts of nuclear fission reactors. According to industry outlet Voxel Matters, the market is forecast to grow 24.4% every year between now and 2034.

Beeson, of course, isn’t the only person in the energy sector to have harnessed the growing capabilities of additive manufacturing. In fact, the industry’s adoption of the technology is on its way to becoming standard practice, especially in the production of replacement parts.

How additive manufacturing helps energy companies replace parts

Aside from the fact that old parts often become impossible to replace, there are other reasons oil and gas companies are taking an interest in additive manufacturing.

Sourcing even newer parts can be a lengthy process—and for crucial equipment like valves and transformers, lead times are lengthening alarmingly. The traditional solution has been to load up on inventory in advance, so that parts are on hand when failures occur. But this approach has all sorts of costs attached to it. Beyond the upfront outlay of purchasing the parts, there is the cost of storing them in warehouses, and then the cost—if the parts are actually ever needed, which is not a given—of transporting them to the sites that need them.

In contrast, a 3D-printed part can be produced on demand and often on site. Hardly surprising, then, that oil majors are incorporating additive manufacturing into their maintenance programs.

In 2022, Shell installed a 3D-printed leak repair clamp and received the European Union’s CE certification for a 3D-printed pressure vessel. The company is also researching 3D printing at its R&D campus in Amsterdam. Elsewhere in the industry, according to a report by Voxel Matters, ConocoPhillips is testing printed burner plugs and valves on gas turbines, Baker Hughes has produced a one-piece buffer tube, and Equinor has printed thousands of components using recycled metal powder.

There is also nothing to stop OEMs from adopting additive manufacturing; an example from earlier this year, involving the production of check valves for the pipes carrying the wastewater from refineries makes this clear.

Due to the corrosive nature of the wastewater, check valves need to be replaced every six months. If, for whatever reason, replacements are unavailable or a valve wears out faster than usual, lead times can be up to 52 weeks’ long. EOS, an industrial 3D printing company, worked with an unnamed OEM to redesign the component. The results: lead times were reduced to just one week, the cost of ownership fell by 30% and the performance of the new design was superior.

“By shifting from a conventional, slow, and expensive process to a simulation-driven, on-demand digital workflow,” said EOS, “the partners aimed to set a new standard for a sector defined by its rigorous technical requirements.”

Major players within the industry are also collaborating on additive manufacturing initiatives. Beginning in 2021, Kongsberg Ferrotech, backed by the likes of Equinor, Shell and Gassco, led a project to develop a machine that harnessed 3D printing to conduct in-situ repairs of subsea components. The machine, called Nautilus, is now “ready for commercial deployment,” according to a January report in World Pipelines.

Then there is the initiative to create a shared “digital inventory standard.” Led by the small, Norwegian tech company Fieldnode, the initiative’s ambition is to reconfigure the supply chain for spare parts around 3D models and additive manufacturing. ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Equinor, Shell, TotalEnergies and Vår Energi are among those participating.

Complications around 3D printing: Intellectual property and applicability

Although FieldNode doesn’t mention the topic explicitly, its industry collaboration project looks designed to help address one of the issues raised by additive manufacturing: intellectual property rights.

In a paper published back in 2013 examining the legalities of designing a 3D-printed firearm, legal scholar Matt Simon explored how one might classify—based on existing copyright and patent law—both the inputs (CAD files) and outputs (finished objects) of 3D printers. He concluded that “current regulatory schemes are ill equipped to deal with the rapidly changing technology landscape.”

More recently, a study from researchers at Lisbon’s IDMEC found an entirely different limitation to the 3D printing of spare parts.

Taking a paper and pulp manufacturer as an empirical test case, they compiled a list of 1,040 stock-keeping units (SKUs) that were theoretically suitable for additive manufacturing. After examining the role of each SKU in production, the potential impact of their failure, the cost of procurement and the cost of production, they found that additive manufacturing methods would be economically beneficial to just five SKUs—under one percent of the total.

A paper factory and an oil refinery will, of course, have completely different machinery, but both are continuous processing sites.

Additive manufacturing dovetails with predictive maintenance

As technology and regulations change, the practical applicability of additive manufacturing will likely increase. But even with correctly licensed models and the necessary powders and printing hardware, the question of when to produce replacement parts remains live: a broken subsea pipe might be fixed more quickly with a 3D printer, but it would be preferable that the pipe didn’t break at all. So while additive manufacturing undeniably improves reactive maintenance, it should really be seen as a complement to predictive maintenance.

Analysis by Grand View made this very point, noting that “industries are increasingly integrating additive manufacturing into smart factories and Industry 4.0 ecosystems, supported by IoT-enabled printers, cloud-based manufacturing platforms, and AI-powered quality control systems.” This programmatic integration of additive manufacturing, the report continues, “enhances production efficiency, reduces downtime, and enables predictive maintenance.”

In the energy sector—and the industrial world more broadly—the divide between software and hardware has been narrowing for a while now. In using additive manufacturing for predictive maintenance, that divide disappears completely.