In this age of heavy focus on operational efficiency, companies are losing a lot of time and money on manual inspection tasks and responding to incidents and alarms that have come in through the existing system. It takes time to get out to the field and investigate the issue and then they may not have the expertise to diagnose the issue quickly. Drones can be utilised right through the oil and gas value chain from inspecting pipelines, storage tanks and offshore platforms.
"Some of the largest oil and gas companies around the world now deploy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, to address a wide variety of operational challenges. This rapidly improving technology, along with advances in big data and artificial intelligence, is poised to transform the O&G industry in the coming years.
The aerial intelligence provided by drones offers several key benefits, including safer inspections and helping companies comply with regulatory requirements — while saving them millions of dollars in labor, remediation, and other costs.
Drones are the perfect solution for conducting visual inspections of infrastructure and gathering extensive data. An increasing number of O&G companies use drones to perform three basic industry functions — pipeline inspection and monitoring, oil well and rig inspection, and surveying and construction monitoring — at a significantly lower cost than ground, manned aircraft or helicopter inspection crews."- DroneDeploy.