MODEC and Terra Drone Corporation, a fellow company specializing in drones and urban air mobility (UAM) technology, have entered into an agreement to enhance floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) unit inspection drones to to enable unmanned inspection, which will reduce the number of manpower required for such tasks.
Following the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed on November 7, 2023, which allowed MODEC to permanently use Terra Drone’s drone technology to measure the hull thickness of crude oil storage tanks of FPSOs operating in Brazil, the duo entered into a joint research and development agreement to deploy advanced drone technology on FPSOs to enhance safety, reduce manpower and increase the efficiency of inspection operations.
While the implementation of drone technology would have enabled a safer inspection process by reducing the need to work at height, the two Japanese companies believe that further optimization of drone inspection technology is essential to overcome the challenging working environments on offshore assets. Given the current execution and efficiency issues of hull thickness measurements, inspection tasks performed by crew members have not yet been fully replaced by drones.
Additionally, MODEC and Terra Drone believe that maintaining asset integrity is crucial to enabling FPSOs and other offshore platforms to operate safely for over 20 years. Although periodic inspections of structures are essential, companies highlight a constraint that inspection work must be carried out alongside production operations by a limited number of crew members. Thus, workforce reduction has become a common challenge across the industry.
In this context, the Japanese duo’s goal is to completely replace manual inspections of crude oil storage tanks with drones in the near future by innovating drone inspection techniques to triple inspection efficiency and reduce inspection costs. Additionally, they hope to deploy drone inspection technology on FPSOs operated by MODEC and widely throughout the industry.
This is expected to help address common industry challenges related to workplace safety and workforce reduction in offshore platform operations. As a result, MODEC and Terra Drone claim that they will contribute to the sustainable operation of FPSOs and other offshore platforms from an environmental, economic and social perspective.
The new agreement between the two companies comes several months after the duo obtained the world’s first approval from the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) for drone measurement of the hull thickness of an FPSO.
Recently, MODEC and JGC Corporation completed a project to measure and quantify methane and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from two FPSOs offshore Brazil.
