Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in oil & gas industry

An unmanned aerial vehicle is an aircraft that carries no human pilot or passengers. UAVs or drones can be fully or partially autonomous but are more often controlled remotely by a human pilot.

The oil and gas industry is one of the top 4 sectors with the greatest potential for UAV integration, after construction, agriculture and insurance.

Oil & gas facilities - both on and off shore - require frequent inspection and maintenance to ensure safety and avoid failure. Visual inspection by an unmanned drone is a quick and cost effective inspection method of critical areas on onshore and offshore constructions.

Drone inspection enables access to otherwise inaccessible structures and details, offering immediate action as an alternative to more traditional, time consuming and costly inspection methods like rope access, sky-lifts, cherry pickers and scaffolding.

Operating UAVs can provide seamless awareness on possible emergency situations such as oil spills, shipping incidents, industrial accidents, acts of terrorism, and so on.

The pipelines carrying inflammable and toxic petroleum products require continuous inspection. An UAV equipped with non-contact sensors can be used for external inspection of the pipeline.

The offshore environment is often regarded as tough and demanding, where it is vital to keep faults as well as loss of production at both the installation and the inspection equipment to a minimum.

UAV inspection of boilers, fuel storage tanks and confined spaces at power plants, refineries and other industrial plants is becoming commonplace. This enables both pilot and NDT personnel to distance themselves from the danger zones, making safe inspection of high risk areas possible.

Furthermore, detailed images of critical components can be obtained, without shutdown or disturbance of the production process.