Health & Safety
Fig. 1. Crude oil is naturally fluorescent – the key to a new spill detection technology.
Accidents drive advances in leak detection technologies
Sean Ottewell investigates novel ways of detecting oil and gas leaks which have been developed in response to a number of recent spills and accidents.
Sean Ottewell investiga sobre nuevas formas de detectar fugas de petróleo y gas que se han desarrollado como respuesta a los últimos casos de vertidos y accidentes.
Sean Ottewell untersucht neue Methoden zum Entdecken von Öl- und Gaslecks, die aufgrund kürzlich erfolgter Austritte und Unfälle entwickelt worden sind.
to offshore oil leak detection. It has built an oil spill detection technology platform that is capable of detecting the natural fluorescence of even tiny amounts of oil in or on water.
T Te company has a long track record
of delivering innovative fluorescence detection solutions for challenging applications such as clinical diagnostics equipment, fertility monitors and pregnancy tests, and authentication of valuable documents. Crude oil is naturally fluorescent - so the company has now used its fluorescence experience to build the new oil spill detection technology platform (Fig. 1). “Te environmental impact of oil and gas leaks has never been more visible to the public - with the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico - yet the solutions
echnology design and development firm Cambridge Consultants has unveiled the first stage of work that is set to give a much-needed boost
currently available do not meet all the requirements in terms of performance and reliability,” said Frances Metcalfe, associate director, oil and gas, at Cambridge Consultants. Currently, aircraft use long-range radar and scanners to detect fluorescence - but they are expensive and difficult to operate. Many oil companies still primarily rely on unsophisticated visual reports which are not consistently accurate. Many leaks are not detected until a slick comes to the surface and is visible to the human eye. Te new technology aims to provide a compact, robust system that can be permanently installed for example along subsea pipelines. Metcalfe added: “To be effective and
trusted, any detection system must detect spills early enough but be immune to false alarms - otherwise it will not be used. Our work so far shows that any reliable oil spill detection system will need to use more than one sensing method, and the best combination will depend largely on where
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