ABSTRACT

Nowadays, due to the low oil price environment, it is required to make production more efficient. One of the most effective ways to make so, is to minimize unplanned shutdowns and keep Turnarounds (TARs) tightly on schedule. Therefore, operators must routinely check the integrity of their assets, especially those whose maintenance requires operations to be shutdown. Inspections of this kind, typically involving hard-to-reach assets, used to mean costly scaffolding, Rope Access Technician (RAT) teams and helicopters. Based on a dedicated study, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) seems to be a good approach to face these aspects. UAV is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard, its flight is controlled either autonomously by on-board computers or by the remote control of a pilot. The use of UAV in Oil&Gas industry is a fast development application and the Asset Integrity Inspection turned out to be the most interesting and feasible for the following main advantages:

  • Cost saving:

  • Time saving: minimum site preparation, no scaffolding

  • HSE advantages

In light of above, Eni has awarded in 2016 a Contract for worldwide Asset Integrity Inspection by UAV and started to implement this kind of inspection on its asset.

Furthermore, Eni is implementing UAVs experimental solutions such as survey activities, environmental and air monitoring etc…

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning, the large majority of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operations were restricted to military applications, mainly for the lack of legislation on this subject severely restricting de-facto the employment of such systems by civilian operators. In 2014, the market was showing a growing number of civil applications in many sectors as well, construction industry, in aerial surveillance, agriculture and other sectors.

The Oil&Gas community discovered the potential of UAVs in support of its operations and confirmed their interest during the OGP Aviation Sub-Committee meetings.

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