Innovation is integral to every industry; oil and gas is no exception. The technology revolution is something the energy sector has long embraced and used to its advantage. In the process, companies have had to reinvent themselves both on land and water, but more recently in air too.
For years, operators have been engaging in costly, time consuming and certain risk-bearing activities to conduct inspections in hard to access areas.
For the first time, this may no longer be needed. Hundreds of miles of pipelines can now be monitored in less than 20 minutes, while operators can watch 150m tall flare stacks in real time and not have to move a single inch off of the ground.
All of this is now possible thanks to drones. Also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones are the latest shout in aviation technology.
Their recent introduction to oil and gas might be beckoning the dawn of a new HSE era for companies in the region.
“Oil and gas companies can accomplish daily aerial monitoring of critical facilities to prevent emergencies, control daily operations in order to avoid accidents or detect a problem at a very early stage, which can help avoid huge financial losses and even save people’s lives,” said Benjamin Lehmann, chief executive officer of Lehmann Aviation.
The latest UAV technology coupled with a high definition camera device is used in regular aerial monitoring of processing plants, factories, stations and wells. While the drone itself provides a bird’s eye view of oil and gas facilities, infra red or thermal cameras attached to it are used to detect hazardous gas leaks from up to 30km long pipelines.
Lehmann says UAVs can prevent emergency situations, such as asset damages, fires, big breakages and accidents, when it is crucial to get immediately an aerial view of damaged facilities to assess the situation.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a live flare tip or exhaust which are some of the most commonly cited examples.
“But it simply could be areas which are awkward to inspect such as the telecommunications tower, the rigs or the platform,” said James Harrison, commercial director at Sky Futures.
Unlike traditional methods used to access flare tips, such as rope access and scaffolding, which require assets to be shut down, drone inspections can be done while the plant is still working.
This, experts claim, can be translated into thousands of dollars in savings.
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There are two types of remotely piloted vehicles on the market specifically designed for oil and gas use- fully automatic and manually controlled with live video-link. While the manually controlled model requires training, the automatic one is very straightforward and easy to use, according to Lehmann.
“The L-A series a.k.a. aerial robots are totally automatic and require no piloting background or skills, so the training for them is limited to software learning and mastering the launch, which is done by hand.”
All you have to do to launch the drone is draw on the touchscreen of a tablet, which will transmit data to the drone using wifi.
The automatic software will then calculate the flight parameters and programme the drone, which, once the flight is completed, will land by itself with HD aerial images on an SD card. Operators can then look at those images and determine whether there is a problem with the inspected facility or not, Lehmann explains.
However impressive this may sound, there is still room for improvement. More needs to be done to achieve better quality, thermal data and live feed.
In addition, one may argue that there is no substitute for the human eye. A strong advocate of the technology, Lehmann begs to differ.
“When it comes to live video monitoring, the drones actually are ‘human eyes’ in the air.
In some instances they are even better than human eyes as they record all the information during the flight, so everything that could possibly not be noticed by an operator during a helicopter flight would be recorded and re-watched.”
The duration of a drone’s flight is often considered a shortcoming too since those, as a rule, are not very long. It normally varies between models and brands, but the longest a drone can stay in the air is 45 minutes, the shortest being 20 to 25 minutes.
Harrison thinks companies should not worry over flight duration as in his experience as little as 12 minutes can suffice.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s actually a really long time when you are recording all the time.
The reason we typically fly 12 minutes is because when we are doing a piece of work, we turn the vehicle back to review the data and make sure we have what we need and check for any anomalies and move on to the next piece of work,” he said.
“There is nothing worse than a drone dying on you in the middle of an inspection and you not being able to do anything about it.
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That is why most standard UAV devices have battery monitoring functions for operators to keep and eye on. Some models, however, are powered by engines, which if inflamable, could ring a few HSE alarm bells. Just imagine the damage a plummeting aerial vehicle, not to mention an inflamed one, could pose to people, assets and operations.
“Our drones are lightweight (around 1 kg) micro-UAVs (92 cm wing span). Thanks to their light weight they would
not cause any serious damage to ground object and they are safe for people, even in case of emergency landing.
“The system is done in such a way that in case of abnormal recovery or if something goes wrong and the engine is off, the aircraft will just glide smoothly towards the ground,” said Lehmann.
As a new piece of emerging technology, drones have also attracted the attention of innovative software developer PixiePath, which has recently made it possible to manage fleets of drones from ‘the cloud’ and essentially allowing centralised data storage and online access.
This could also be used as an opportunity by hackers to break into the cloud and steal sensitive data.
Hijacking a drone out of sight does not seem like an impossible scenario either. But Harrison wards off any such fears.
“We fly in visual line of sight so very close to the operator and because we typically work in isolated environments on a refinery, onshore or on a platform offshore. It is a very secure environment so the risk of hacking is further mitigated,” he said.
This leads us to the big issue of drone use regulations, which have been making the international headlines in the past month. In June, BP secured the first permit to fly drones over land to inspect oil pipelines in Alaska. Last month the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the body overseeing the regulations of drones in the US, gave VDOS the green light to inspect flare stacks for Shell Oil Company in the Gulf of Mexico.
But for national oil companies in the region drones are a slightly unexplored territory with regulations falling into the greyest of areas. UAV specialist company Sky Futures, wants to see a clear differentiation in the regulations between commercial and industrial use.
“There is a huge difference between operating a professional service in an oil and gas environment. We believe that people who undertake this need to be highly trained and really know what they are doing. There is a huge difference between that and someone who wants to buy a drone and fly it in the park on the weekend,” said Harrison.
“People who work professionally needed to be looked at closely to ensure they are complying with all health and safety regulations,” he added.
In November Sky Futures signed a deal with ADNOC for offshore and onshore drone inspections. Ready to start work when the contract is finalised, Harrison says they have health and safety all covered.
“We work very closely with civil aviation authorities and government bodies and also with customs immigration and other departments to ensure that we are operating in a very safe manner.
“We always inform the different agencies and bodies of exactly what we are doing and the standards to which we are undertaking the work, which includes giving evidence of our pilots and how much training they have had, the information we are capturing and how it’s being captured and the professional context of how the UAV is being used.”
Compared to Western Europe and the US, the use of drones has not been as pervasive. However, UAV vendors are convinced that this is about to change.
“Within the GCC people are very forward looking, embrace new technology and equip to understand the benefit,” said Harrison, who is convinced that the future of drones in the region is bright.
They are interested in the practical side of things so not just how much money we can save for our clients, but also how we can operate safely and increase safety which is a really big thing across the Middle East.”
