Cutting-edge technologies are driving the development and adoption of advanced inspection techniques in the oil and gas sector, which address the shortcomings of conventional methods while enhancing accuracy, efficiency, and safety.
The key areas of innovation transforming oil and gas monitoring and maintenance include automated inspection systems, non-destructive testing, robot and drone inspections, machine learning and AI, and digital workflows.
Traditional inspections typically rely on manual processes and human judgement, leading to missed defects, increased downtime and higher operational costs, as well as limited data analysis due to inconsistent documentation.
Drones in particular have substantially replaced traditional inspection methods, especially for structures that are challenging and potentially dangerous for human inspections. They can perform general visual inspections, close visual inspections, thermal inspections, and data collection for three- and four-dimensional model generation.
There are also different kinds of inspection robots with varying degrees of autonomy that enable maintenance personnel to remotely conduct asset inspections. These include unmanned ground vehicles, flexible robot arms, small-scale robotics systems for internal inspections of pipelines, wall-climbing robots, and autonomous surface/underwater vehicles.
Oil and gas facilities can have hundreds of different assets, kilometres of piping, and thousands of connections points where leaks or other infrastructure failures can occur. This includes substation and power distributions systems, which are traditionally expensive, hazardous and time-consuming to inspect, but when left unchecked can lead to serious incidents and ongoing downtime events.
Automated oil and gas drone inspection systems can reduce the time needed to conduct power distribution inspections by between 50 and 80 per cent, allowing them to be conducted more frequently.Drones can also be used for floating roof and flare stack inspections, mitigating the height-based hazards involved with workers conducting them, as well as capturing high-resolution data and thermal images. Notably, using a drone to conduct a flare stack inspection can be done when the flare is live and does not require shutting down the operation.
A key advantage of using robots or drones to perform inspections is their ability to do so as a non-destructive testing (NDT) method. NDT is the use of non-invasive analysis techniques to quantitatively inspect the safety and integrity of mission-critical infrastructure and systems without interfering with the overall operation or future usefulness of those assets.
Common problems detected through these techniques include surface corrosion, mechanical damage, and cracks in infrastructure. Integrating NDT with the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as associated technologies such as autonomous systems and machine learning, has many benefits for oil and gas operators and is rapidly becoming the new norm.
NEW INSPECTION ROBOTS OPTIMISING OPERATIONS
Last year, Brazilian state-owned company Petrobras partnered with Swiss robot manufacturer ANYbotics to develop automated offshore inspections using its ANYmal X solution, which is the world’s only explosion-proof inspection robot with articulated legs.
Equipped with a high-resolution camera, laser imaging, gas sensor, thermal camera and wide-spectrum directional microphone, the robot can map installations in images and as 3D point clouds.
It can also verify anomalies, equipment noise, temperature in electrical panels, leak detection, valve position, local instrument readings, and the presence of mandatory plant safety items. Once inspections are complete, captured images are transmitted to databases wirelessly and can later be verified by artificial intelligence.
Petrobras invested US$4 million in six robots and will qualify their use as an inspection solution for future deployment, as well as automating their operational routines and enhancing their asset monitoring capabilities. The robots will perform repetitive and hazardous inspection tasks on Petrobras’ FPSO vessels as part of a long-term pilot throughout 2024, with the aim of improving maintenance by optimising onboard manhours required for inspections, increasing reliability and frequency of inspection, and improving inspection data quality.
Petrobras said the insights gained from the robotic inspection missions would enable operators to deploy their teams quickly and safely only when needed. The company added: “[The robot’s] multisensory condition monitoring capabilities may enable anomaly detection in assets, 3D mapping for situational awareness, digital twins, and gas leak detection.”
Researchers at the University of Houston (UH) are also developing an autonomous subsea inspection robot to identify potential pipeline leaks and structural failures, with the aim of making the inspection process much safer and more cost effective while also protecting subsea environments. Current inspection techniques often require a well-trained human diver and substantial time and money, with the challenges exacerbated if the inspection target is deep underwater.
Named SmartTouch, the technology in development consists of remote operated vehicles equipped with multiple stress wave-based smart touch sensors, video cameras and scanning sonars that can swim along subsea pipelines to inspect flange bolts. The US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has pointed out that bolted connections have accelerated the rate of pipeline accidents that result in leaks. Zheng Chen, the Bill D. Cook Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UH and co-principal investigator, explained: “By automating the inspection process with this state-of-the-art robotic technology, we can dramatically reduce the cost and risk of these important subsea inspections. “[This] will lead to safer operations of offshore oil and gas pipelines as less intervention from human divers will be needed.”
A SmartTouch prototype has been tested in the lab and in Galveston Bay near Houston, with the experiments demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed approach for inspecting the looseness of subsea bolted connections. Prof Chen added: “Ultimately, the project will push the boundaries of what can be accomplished by integrating robotics and structural health monitoring technologies. “With proper implementation, the rate of subsea pipeline failure and related accidents will decrease, and subsea operations will be free to expand at a faster rate than before.”
