Oil & gas industry are both very familiar and strange to the public , people are consuming oil &gas everyday but very few got to know the technologies of oil exploitation, refining, storage, and transportation.
Among the various work items of oil workers, pipeline inspection is the most basic and difficult one. In order to ensure the safety of energy transmission, oil workers must conduct regular inspections of oil and gas pipelines.
The total mileage of oil and gas pipelines in China is nearly 150,000 kilometers. The pressure on the safety maintenance and daily inspection of oil and gas pipelines is increasing. Manual inspections have been unable to meet the needs of the industry. In order to improve inspection efficiency and avoid potential safety hazards, pipeline inspection drones have developed rapidly and have been used widely in recent years.
UAV for oil&gas inspection solutions:
I Oilfield geography mapping, pipeline planning
Visualized 3D image data acquisition system for specific mapping of oilfield exploration, mining, and land planning.
II Petrochemical pipeline inspection, high-altitude equipment inspection
The drone replaces manual work for high-altitude equipment inspections, and oil depot monitoring.
III Accident spot reconnaissance
The UAV can monitor through the smoke and patrol the accident fire source. The gas detection system can detect the pipeline leakage in time and take prompt measures.
Compared with manpower, the advantages of drone inspection are obvious: the drone is flexible, easy to operate, and can carry multi-mode payloads to adapt to different application scenarios. It can not only overcome the difficulties of long distances, complicated road conditions, and difficulty in reaching people, but also realize the functions of 24 hours’monitoring, tracking and locking, etc., effectively making up for the shortcomings of other inspection methods.
Sinopec, the world’s largest oil refining company, has officially partnered with MMC in 2016 to take the lead in the UAV’s entry into the petrochemical industry. Recently, Sinopec and MMC signed a purchase contract again, and the order value reached record highs. MMC become the largest UAV supplier of Sinopec in 2018.
