OPERATIONS & MAINTENANCE
Handing over visual inspection to drones makes maintenance far simpler
ARE DRONES IN THE PIPELINE?
Chris Johnson explores the buzz around drones in the oil industry T
he honey bee can travel over five miles and then remember its way home, despite possessing a brain the size of a pinhead. Scientists
have been putting them in virtual reality simulators to help improve unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone technology. Although the bee currently has the edge, drone technology is catching up. So, what are the challenges and opportunities when using drones to monitor and inspect oil and gas pipelines? Drones are being employed in a wider range of sectors and for myriad purposes. Te further growth and adoption of this technology will be encouraged by consumer market growth, spillovers from the military sector and the possibilities opened up by 5G. Te potential for drones to revolutionise the world of maintenance is clear. Tey certainly pass the ‘D test’: tasks that are dirty, dangerous and dull could all be left to drones. BP, Shell and Exxon have already begun using drones for asset inspection and other tasks. Following an incident in 2008, where Exxon’s use of sonar technology was implicated in the deaths of 100 whales near Madagascar, the company recently used drones to help monitor the locations of whales off the coast of Santa Barbara. But what about the benefits for pipelines?
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OPPORTUNITY IN THE PIPELINES From Alaska to the Niger Delta, oil pipelines are often located in inhospitable or even dangerous environments. In addition to their vast size, this fact makes maintenance through visual inspection a dangerous task. By handing the task of visual inspection over to drones, human workers are no longer in harm’s way. Making the task of maintenance safer is not the only incentive. Early investors in the technology are seeing significant cost savings. Although it is difficult to quantify the precise saving, research by Roland Berger has estimated that drone- based inspection of oil and gas rigs leads to cost savings of around 90%. Te same research estimated that the use of drones has cut maintenance times from eight weeks to five days. Te bottom line is that drones will provide a more cost-effective alternative to traditional asset inspection methods such
as helicopters and ground vehicles. However, drones are not simply
replacing existing methods. Teir agility allows them to offer visualisation and data analysis that existing methods cannot compete with. For example, satellites are limited by their orbit and weather can disrupt the accuracy of the images they provide. An engineer would
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