drones

An oil pipeline that runs across Saudi Arabia was hit by drones on 14 May west of its capital of Riyadh, the Saudi energy minister said, shortly after rebels in Yemen claimed they carried out coordinated drone strikes against the kingdom.

During the last decade, the use of drones for industrial asset inspections has grown significantly. The ability to inspect in-service flares can eliminate millions of dollars of operational expenditure and mitigate safety risks presented by traditional access methods.

Robots have been a part of industrial production for decades, but the interface between humans and robots has changed as automation technologies increased in complexity, scope, and scale. Once a novelty, collaborative robots are projected to become a significant element of the automation landscape.

Drones will be just one of the tools that the service company uses in its drive toward net-zero carbon emissions.

One of the more significant benefits of drones in the field to date has been their ability to improve safety in the field.

Subsea inspection/repair/maintenance services have traditionally relied on vessel-based, ROV, or diver operations. In the longer term, identifying significant incremental savings in these operations is not sustainable and an innovative approach deploying digital technologies is being investigated.

Venture groups spend their time evaluating hundreds of companies each year to only make a handful of investments. These two cover interesting ends of the upstream spectrum: aerial drones and downhole artificial lift.

Ground sensors on assets over a broad area have limited returns on investment if the asset life cycle is less than 10 years, and obsolescence of the technology if it exceeds 10 years. Complementing sensors with aerial remote sensing at scale may help to mitigate these issues.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are lightweight, low-cost aircraft platforms operated from the ground that can be outfitted with imaging or nonimaging payloads. UASs offer health, safety, and environment professionals a promising opportunity to reduce risks by keeping people out of harm’s way.

Iraq plans to use drones to monitor and protect its oil export and production pipelines from the first quarter of 2018, an oil ministry spokesman said on 18 December.