Paw Patrol: How robots are changing oil and gas operations
Posted: January 17, 2025
At Chevron’s El Segundo refinery in California, a very good boy named Spot is doing his daily rounds. Trotting past pipes, pumps and transformers, he checks that everything is working as it should and dutifully reports any faults back to his owners.
Loyal as he might seem in his duties, Spot isn’t an actual dog. He’s part of a breed of autonomous robots that are increasingly changing how oil and gas companies monitor their assets on land, at sea and from the air.
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How oil companies are using canine robots on and offshore
Oil and gas companies have found a growing number of uses for inspection robots in recent years. Not only can they offer improved monitoring and maintenance, they also reduce risks for workers who would otherwise have to navigate dangerous environments such as offshore oil platforms.
“A huge number of robots are now being deployed in oil and gas operations, including terrestrial crawlers, quadrupeds, aerial drones, autonomous underwater vehicles and remotely operated vehicles,” says Anson Fernandes, an oil and gas analyst at GlobalData.
The most advanced ground-based models, like Spot, have legs that allow them to climb up stairs, step over pipes, squeeze through tight spaces and even move sideways. Chevron uses the robots for routine inspections, where they can gather much more detailed and precise data to fine-tune the refinery’s operations and feed predictive maintenance tools.
Equipped with thermal cameras, acoustic leak and gas detectors, and remote sensors to navigate the terrain, the robots read gauges, check tank levels and probe the performance of electrical equipment. All that data is then analyzed using machine learning, allowing a company to spot anomalies much more effectively.
“By having more reliable data, what I can do is understand sooner what might be going wrong. Sometimes the changes that we might be looking for are so subtle,” says Marilee Phan, a robotics engineer at Chevron.
Like any good boy, Spot also takes orders: although he performs checks on an automated schedule, Chevron workers can also remotely instruct the robot to open a door or zoom in on a specific location.
Chevron is not the only oil and gas company experimenting with animalistic robots. Petrobras already uses another model to carry out similar visual inspections on some of its floating production storage and offloading vessels, where oil from offshore fields is processed before transfer to a tanker.
In addition to reading instruments and checking for anomalies, the patrolling robots use high-resolution cameras and laser imaging to map the ships’ infrastructure in images and 3D point clouds. According to ANYbotics, the company that makes the robot, Petrobras could use the data to create digital twins of its vessels in the future.[1]
Robotics below the surface
Robots can be a big help below the surface, too.
In one of the first use cases in the midstream sector, TotalEnergies has already deployed an autonomous underwater vehicle to inspect model pipelines placed on the seabed. The yellow sub—named Subsea Precise Inspector with Close Eyes, or SPICE—uses an arm to probe the pipes up close and even includes a subsea docking station.
In late 2022, Total tested the robot, which is made by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, by integrating its own technology to measure the test pipe’s electrical potential gradient. The readings can indicate whether the pipe has any coating defects that could interfere with its protection against corrosion.
The company says adding other sensors could make the sub even more effective, enabling it to gather more granular data on aging infrastructure that is otherwise hard to access.[2] Robotics is already the focus of one of the company’s four R&D labs—illustrating the technology’s growing importance.
Back at Chevron, robotic diving inspectors have turned out to be equally useful on land. Across its oil and gas facilities in the U.S., the company has also started using robots to inspect storage tanks, which usually involves draining them and sending in workers to manually check the integrity of the tank bottom.
Now, the company can send in robots carrying live cameras, advanced sensors and other technology to allow for more precise inspections. Plus, the tanks don’t require draining and venting, which saves downtime, and—like in offshore applications—the risk to human workers is also reduced.
Are automated refineries the future?
With all these robots taking over maintenance tasks, you may wonder whether the future consists of fully automated refineries and oil platforms, with not a human in sight. Some companies seem to be going in that direction, even if the robots aren’t quite ready to take over yet.
In Germany, Shell has deployed a whole squad of robotic workers to help run its sprawling Rheinland refinery complex. That includes Spot, the canine lookalike with a camera for a head, as well as a compact drone and a third vehicle with caterpillar tracks that lend it a distinctly Wall-E look.
Like most oil and gas workers, they each have their specialties: while the tracked robot performs inspections in areas with explosion hazards, Spot navigates stairs and narrow areas to take his readings, and the drone inspects the roofs of the tank farms and other points that are easier to access from the air.
Shell workers can monitor the fleet’s data output in real time; when it isn’t on an automated round, the tracked robot can even be remotely controlled with a gamepad by employees working from home.
“Through our robots and drones, we can conduct closer inspections of our processes and facilities,” says Thomas Klein, Shell’s digital innovation lead at the facility.
So is this new breed of robots the oil worker’s best friend? Helpers like Spot certainly come with some advantages over actual canine companions. As Chevron points out, the robot never chews up the furniture.
