Whether applied to something simple like food delivery or a more complicated undertaking like manufacturing, the adoption of robotic and drone technology is evolving at a rapid pace, and energy must be poised to take optimal advantage of that evolution.
According to Marty Robinson, global technology associate of robotics with Dow, the petrochemical industry’s biggest challenge is being ready for "the next step and to go beyond what’s already established, such as roof inspections, electrical lines, flaring inspections and internal digital inspections."
Robinson said that working with regulators to do emissions testing and monitoring is the direction we’re headed.
He also emphasized the urgency of "working with the different committees to come up with regulations for better insight."
Joining Robinson on a roundtable panel of experts at the 7th Annual Energy Drone+Robotics Summit held in The Woodlands, Texas, Josh Buchanan, inspection and asset integrity engineer with Chevron, said he believed "data management and the influx of that data requires discipline all around to determine how to capture it in a consistent fashion and how to organize it so that it’s discoverable. And then once we’ve got that, we bring in the subject matter experts that really understand procedures and workflows."
Katherine Papageorge, midcontinent digital advisor with Chevron, was candid about her biggest challenge in utilizing robotics: fluency across the business unit.
Oftentimes, showing, not telling, is what really is effective in building our business.
"It’s sad to say this out loud, but it’s honest," she said. "We are in the Permian doubling production in the next five years — that’s the opportunity there. We have people who are other-resourced and other-informed about what technologies and processes they have in place, and they are just running head-first at doing the work to get things done."
It’s her job as a coordinator, Papa-george said, to drive home the importance of following established requirements and rules for completing processes.
"There’s a continual battle of finding the pockets of folks who don’t know we have a program, and then influencing them into the appropriate behavior and leveraging us in a way that makes sense," she said. "Oftentimes, showing, not telling, is what really is effective in building our business. I tell my whole team that we have opportunity to collect data for managers, but until I survey the location so I can give them weekly construction photos for proper execution, they don’t understand the real business opportunity there."
It takes a lot of legwork to bring that awareness and those competencies and regulatory compliance abilities together plus "just sharing the work of what we do," Papageorge observed. "Really, we are so spread out and everybody is running toward the prize, which is increased production in the Permian."
Shankar Nadarajah, global drone inspection lead with ExxonMobil, said his company has already proven the success of this technology, so the challenge he faces is managing customers’ expectations.
"Today we can do visual inspections and get quantitative measurements," he said. "Using drones, we can get even more information, so my customers all want us to drive automation to a scale where we can have a second set of computer eyes operating and overseeing all of our refineries and production facilities and informing us before anything happens."
This "predictive maintenance," Nadarajah said, is about "constantly pushing those barriers, and working with our third parties, our partners and our data managers to help us get there."
Suzanne Lemieux, director of operations security and emergency response policy for API and panel moderator, concluded the discussion by noting that while drones "are a great tool, at the end of the day, it’s always about the data, and not necessarily about the tools."
