While the introduction of unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) has been a game-changer in the oil and gas and petrochemical sectors, industry leaders agree the next major step in the field will be utilizing fully autonomous drones.
Dustin Waller, senior unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) analyst for Occidental Petroleum.
The question is: How long will it take before that next step is realized and what must the industry do to accelerate that timeframe?
"That's a question we've been talking about for years," said Dustin Waller, senior unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) analyst for Occidental Petroleum. "When do I want it? Tomorrow."
More realistically, Waller hopes fully autonomous drones will be adopted "within the next year or two if the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and everything comes together to get the system in place."
Until then, Waller said, he would like "to have a drone in a box and a guy who could just go out there and watch it."
"I get that's kind of a pain, but it is a step in the right direction," he said recently in an oil and gas asset owners' roundtable discussion at the Energy Drone and Robotics Virtual Summer Summit. "The technology of the future of automation is the key to any kind of massive fleet and team. Hopefully it will be in the next year or two, because we could definitely utilize it in these use cases."
Mark Hutcherson, ConocoPhillips' director of operations excellence, as well as knowledge and innovation lead of the company's UAS Advisory Team, said he agreed with Waller's timeline estimate.
"What I do know is that there is demand," Hutcherson said. "We are getting asked more and more frequently how we can incorporate something overhead into the suite of other autonomous vehicles we're looking at. What can carry out routine inspections from the ground, and what needs to be done from above?
"Certainly with all the data coming in... we have to have some kind of reliable image recognition. And it's clearly got to be surveillance - by exception, at that point - by a human. If somebody's got to continue to analyze that, lots of folks are going to continue to have to oversee it, and that's going to be a challenge from an ROI standpoint."
Old school vs. new school
Waller compared the "old-school way" of leak detection to the current UAV technology.
"You would just walk with a hand-held device to see if there was a leak. If there was, you'd document and report it, and then the other guys would come out and take care of it," Waller said.
Drones now allow Waller and his team to do the same amount of work "within 30-45 minutes, compared to two or two-and-a-half hours the old way," he explained. "So the efficiency and the safety in themselves are no-brainers, as far as ROI [goes]."
This improved turnaround time to get leaks reported and repaired also reduces the amount of emissions released into the atmosphere, Waller added.
"It has been very positive," he said.
"If you've ever watched Elon Musk launch a Falcon 9 and recover that 12-footlong pencil on a barge that's moving in the Atlantic Ocean, you know the capability is already here," noted Larry Barnard, an adviser for Chevron's Downstream & Chemicals, Manufacturing -- UAS Governance. "What we need to do is marry that autonomy in the hardware with anomaly detection, identification and automating those processes. That's where the ROI is."
The vehicle in and of itself does not provide ROI "unless it's helping you make a faster and better business decision," Barnard said. "It's going to save you an environmental incident or it's going to save you a lost-profit opportunity."
