Concurrent 12. Oral Presentation for: Minimising the burden of hazardous area inspections

Abstract

Presented on Wednesday 17 May: Session 12

The requirement for hazardous area inspections is a mandatory, licence to operate, requirement for oil and gas installations and requires a significant resources and maintenance budget. The conventional requirement is to inspect every item of hazardous area electrical equipment once every 4 years. In Woodside Energy’s Australian assets alone, there are over 150 000 items requiring inspection. In some areas where there are issues with having personnel inspecting equipment and where exclusion zones have been put in place, inspection has required us to utilise robotic inspection techniques. This has included use of Boston Dynamic’s Spot, a walking quadrupedal robot and an ExRobotics certified Ex-R2 crawler. Our initial method of close visual inspections was to have an inspector sitting outside the exclusion zone and manipulating the robot until they had a good visual image of the equipment which was recorded as evidence of the inspection. In the case where the equipment item was at high level, a drone was used in the same way. The efficiency gained from using this technique was estimated by the inspection team to be double that of manually inspecting the equipment. While this technique is newly being developed and requires the inspectors to be continually monitoring the inspections, it is hoped that in the future, machine learning would allow the robots to autonomously inspect the equipment items and report anomalies based on changes from previous inspections. To date we have trialled this onshore only, but we do see great potential in utilising this offshore also.

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