UAVIA, TotalEnergies utilize drone to perform offshore GHG quantification campaign

Offshore staff

PARIS — UAVIA, the French National Research Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (URCA), and TotalEnergies have announced the success of a first autonomous greenhouse-gas quantification campaign in the Netherlands in late 2022, at TotalEnergies offshore platforms in the North Sea, based on the AUSEA solution.

During a week of operations in October, UAVIA and TotalEnergies performed 16 flights over offshore platforms, using an UAVIA inside autonomous drone. They validated the following industry disruptive features:

• Physical sampled data (gas concentrations and wind) looped into the drone to allow real-time redirection of the autonomous navigation, leading to the exhaustive collection of data for precise emissions retro modeling;
• Very high frequency data processing on edge, leveraging cloud acceleration offered by the UAVIA architecture, reaching the targeted AUSEA sensor processing high frequency of 24 Hertz;
• Wind data acquisition onboard the drone, and fusion with the sampled data; and
• Remote and real-time monitoring and visualization via the IP communication link available on site.

All processed and raw data were made available in real time through the secured data processing pipeline of UAVIA Robotics Platform, allowing visualization in 4D (x-y-z-t) of methane and CO₂ concentrations, and of wind direction and speed.

In the course of 2023, UAVIA continues its collaboration with TotalEnergies on the AUSEA project with an aim to fly AUSEA sensors on autonomous drones above additional TotalEnergies sites.

Lilian Joly, researcher specialized in environmental science and spectroscopy at URCA, said, “Embedding the AUSEA sensor on different drones made autonomous and able to process our algorithms by UAVIA Technology, allows to do the measurements campaigns from distance and to visualize the concentrations in real time through UAVIA’s unified interface. It simplifies dramatically the overall process.” 

03.07.2023