The following is an excerpt from our solution brief, Oil & Gas Asset Management, which explores how a drone-based platform can provide new levels of safety and efficiency in oil & gas operations. Download the solution brief to learn more.
The U.S. is home to over 2.4 million miles of pipeline, making our network of energy pipelines the largest in the world. Not to mention thousands of tanks and wellpads, with superpads—those that can house 30-40 wells—becoming more and more common.
For oil & gas firms, improving asset management is paramount. It requires taking inventory of, inspecting, and maintaining hundreds of wellpads and tanks, plus miles of pipeline. The foremost methods for doing this are deploying manned aircraft to perform visual inspections, and sending roustabouts on trucks to inspect equipment manually and to inventory assets.
The problem: These methods are dangerous and expensive, and they typically don’t provide robust data.
Manned aircraft missions are inexpensive, but they’re not comprehensive—which means any information coming from the missions is not structured and is seldom actionable. Manned aircraft missions that do collect adequate data can become prohibitively expensive, making it difficult to keep tabs on all of your assets frequently enough to catch damage before it leads to failure. And beyond cost, flying helicopters is risky due to rugged terrain, weather events, and noncompliant aircraft out in the oilfield.
Besides the cost and risk, aggregating the data you collect into a single, standardized database can be messy, if not impossible.
For oil & gas firms that need to manage infrastructure over miles of terrain, PrecisionHawk provides a flexible, cost-effective, and data-intensive way to inspect assets.
By incorporating data collection, processing, and reporting into a streamlined, end-to-end drone-based solution, we’ve made it easier to start using drones. You’ll replace dangerous ground-based and manned aircraft inspections with drone deployments; unstructured data with integrated data delivered directly to your systems of record; hours of tedious image review with machine intelligence; and data overload with a focused system of reporting.
By deploying a drone-based platform, the results are clear:
A safe and effective flight is founded on drone hardware, but oilfields and pipelines present a challenging environment for any aircraft; they may be located in windy or wet areas or on rugged terrain. Our drone operators—a.k.a pilots—fly hardware that’s purpose-built for such a challenging environment. It’s lightweight, but rugged, and includes rotor blade guards to mitigate the damage that could occur on contact.
The higher the quality of the sensor payload, the higher the quality of the analysis—so our operators deploy leading thermal, infrared, and LiDAR sensors, a methane detection laser, and optical gas indicators (OGI).
For manual inspections, high zoom is ideal, so PrecisionHawk pilots might use a camera with high combined optical and digital zoom. For capturing data that will be processed by machine intelligence, they use cameras with large sensors.
If a high methane reading is detected, our operators use TDLAS lasers combined with OGI MWIR to double-check the reading.
To execute missions, our pilots use PrecisionFlight. The software’s intelligent flight planning enables operators to deploy manual, semi-autonomous, and fully autonomous missions that comply with regulations and safety management systems.
A Typical Mission:
While capturing asset conditions at a single point in time is useful, you can gain greater insight by tracking trends over a given period. Using PrecisionFlight’s repeatable flight plans, operators are able to capture multiple data sets, from separate missions, that correlate precisely.
PrecisionFlight’s advanced features make drone-based inspections accessible. With the right training, anybody can conduct safe, fast, and effective missions.
Beyond flight software, the skills of your drone operators are critical to the safety and effectiveness of your drone-based inspections. The pilot in command must understand your objectives and follow rigorous procedures, regardless of whether they’re your own staff or PrecisionHawk’s experienced flight operators.
To meet these requirements, PrecisionHawk’s leaders—many of whom are former Navy Top Gun pilots—developed our industry-leading drone operating procedures:
These are principles we require of all of PrecisionHawk’s flight stakeholders. Whether they’re our 100-plus full-time pilots, the more than 15,000 pilots in our drone pilot network, or our clients’ own staff, we’ve designed our training regimen to help professionals of any background achieve this standard of excellence. And everyone, from program directors to visual observers, is responsible for maintaining discipline in the field.
After you collect data, you need a focused system for analyzing and processing it. Sure, your analysts can pore over the terabytes of raw imagery and video that result from drone-based inspections. But, by harnessing the power of machine learning, you can hone the process, improving the overall precision and time-to-value of your module health analysis.
With our aerial intelligence platform, drone operators can upload data and imagery into PrecisionHawk’s cloud-based system, PrecisionAnalytics, which cross-references the uploaded imagery against thousands of terabytes of oil & gas asset equipment, flagging issues.
PrecisionAnalytics features include:
Typical issues that analysts identify using drone-based imagery include:
Our team of data analysts can produce these annotations or we can leave it up to you.
Once analysts have produced their findings, others need to take action. But how do you give cross-functional and external stakeholders the insights they need (without exposing them to the voluminous detail)?
PrecisionAnalytics’ flexible reporting and integration features enable you to distribute information across your organization—whether it be exporting an Excel and Word document or integrating with other software, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and asset management systems. This allows for faster fixes to issues.
By developing a workflow and communication protocol that maximizes the potential of your aerial intelligence, each of these tools will let you turn data into action. And in doing so, your stakeholders will benefit from the power of drones.
Our industry experts can assist in your evaluation of when, where, and how to incorporate drone-based aerial intelligence into your operations. Our global network of drone operators and trainers are ready to execute safe, efficient, and effective flights on your behalf. And our engineers are daily optimizing PrecisionAnalytics to better automate and accelerate your imagery analysis and reporting. Through all, we’re with you every step of the way.
Download our full solution brief for more details on how you can use drone-based aerial intelligence across the oil & gas asset lifecycle.
To speak with one of our consultants about our Oil & Gas Solution, contact us.