Drone partnership investigating crude storage inspections on FPSOs, platforms

MODEC and Terra Drone have entered an agreement covering joint R&D concerning inspection drones for FPSOs.

It follows an MoU signed by the two companies last November.

Since then, MODEC has been deploying Terra Drone’s drone technology to measure the hull thickness of crude oil storage tanks in FPSOs operating offshore Brazil. Results are said to have demonstrated safer inspections through reducing the need for working at height.

However, further optimization of the drone inspection service is needed to address the constraints of the harsh working environments on the platforms, notably issues with the execution and efficiency of hull thickness measurements.

In these cases, inspection tasks performed by crew members have not yet been fully replaced by drones.

MODEC points out that maintaining asset integrity is critical to long-term operations of FPSOs and platforms. There is a constraint that inspection tasks must be performed in parallel with production operations by a limited number of crew members.

After identifying improvement areas based on field feedback, the partnership has committed to further developing drone inspection technologies to enable full manual inspections of crude oil storage tanks by drones in the near future.

They claim this could in the short term triple inspection efficiency and lower inspection costs. Also, the technology could be made available not simply to MODEC-operated FPSOs but also more widely, helping the industry to address challenges related to occupational safety and manpower reduction in offshore platform operations.