Owner in Spain, Consultant in Mexico and Architect in USA|| Drones in Oil & Gas
Oil & Gas Industry is considered as one of the biggest sectors in the world, in terms of dollar value. Many big companies in the upstream and downstream segment, have already started to experiment with digital technologies, including cloud computing, digital oil fields, digital twins, robotics, automation, predictive maintenance, machine learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring pace in decision making and reduce project cost.
Today, we are introducing, “Servicios de Ingeniería”, a technology firm based in Mexico, specialized in providing topography, mapping, and engineering services to the Construction, Mining, and Oil & Gas Industry. They are also using drones and satellite imageries to map their client’s assets and to carry out elevation profiling and volume estimation based works.
Video: Aurelio Acosta story.
Aurelio Acosta, founder of “Servicios de Ingeniería”, has 20 years of experience in the field of topo-surveys, GPS and GNSS technologies. He is an expert in using these technologies for various use-cases in the field of mapping and topography. He has recently started working in the field of Photogrammetry and LiDAR since 2015.
He has an interesting story regarding one of his projects — for laying of gas pipelines on “VHC Gas Station” in Cabo San Lucas region. This is a classic example of how the combination of “orthomosaic and satellite imageries overlayed with AutoCAD files” can help architects/engineering teams that are sitting in different corners of the world in creating structural designs.
VHC group was looking for hand-holding for their planning and monitoring of industrial area on 17.51 acres of land.
Fig: Layout for Gas Station, warehouse, and concrete plants
“Servicios de Ingeniería” came to the rescue of the VHC group.
The first task was to highlight official limits/boundaries of ownership in GIS-based software, followed by tracing the same on-field using GPS/GNSS equipment.
Post tracing of boundaries, 3D laser technology was used to figure out elevation values of the entire area of interest. This information was sufficient to plan out major activities of work including placement of Gas Station, Building, etc.
The next task was to constantly update the progress of the project, which was carried out using drone-based maps/ orthomosaics.
Report: Drone Image Processing Reports.
“Servicios de Ingeniería” was facing two major problems:
- Preparation of Reports:
In construction projects, the elaboration of progress reports has always required a lot of effort. It is difficult to generate actionable insights from drone mapping, resulting in a delay in the decision-making process and in turn, leading to an increase in the overall cost of the project.
2. Client, Consultants, and Architects in different locations:
While the owner of the company was operating from Spain, half of their architecture team was in Montana USA, another half in L A, USA and consultant was in Mexico. There is a need for an effective solution by which they can act as a single source of truth for the whole team.
Indshine offers “Servicios de Ingeniería” a simple and intuitive digital platform where the client, consultants and engineering team could access the engineering drawings from their respective locations and observe the progress of work in real-time.
Now, it is much easier for all stakeholders to access drone and satellite-based high-resolution maps including orthomosaics and digital elevation models. Moreover, the option of overlaying AutoCAD files is cherry on the cake.
Click on the above VHC Gas Station project to get hands-on experience.
Acosta explains - Indshine has the feature of adding collaborators in the project so that they contribute their observations, make modifications and add information, this feeds the project and is given an efficient and real-time follow-up, helping to take decisions in a faster and more efficient way, reducing the time and total costs of the project.
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