Energy industry looks to FAA to finish work on BVLOS
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Companies in the energy industry are eagerly awaiting FAA action on a final BVLOS rule, which they say could greatly enhance the safety and efficiency of their operations.
Speakers addressing the opening day of the Energy Drone & Robotics Summit 2025 in The Woodlands, Texas on Monday called on federal officials to come up with smart regulations to govern the operation of UAVs in ways that benefit both the oil and gas industry and the general public.
“We all need to focus on what is keeping us safe and keeping the risk in check,” Jared Markes, an engineer with Devon Energy, said on the sidelines of the conference.
Markes said the passage of a comprehensive BVLOS rule would enable oil and gas companies to operate more safely in a number of ways, such as dispatching a drone to check up on an incident at a remote well site, rather than having human inspectors drive out to the site.
“If I get an alarm at a facility that something is leaking. I can have the nearest drone respond within a minute to go over there and check the situation,” he said. “Putting somebody in a truck in some situations may take two hours for them to drive all the way out to a remote location themselves.”
Dispatching a pre-positioned drone to respond to alerts in this way also could improve a company’s highway safety record.
“Statistically, driving’s one of the most dangerous things we all do. So, if you could take people off the road and also respond to a situation quicker, there’s a tremendous amount of value in that,” he said.
Suzanne Lemieux, director of security and emergency management for the American Petroleum Institute, said the trade group has long advocated for drone regulations that would open up more opportunities to deploy UAVs across the oil and gas industry.
“The BVLOS rule is one we’ve been waiting on for nine years. It was in the 2016 FAA reauthorization, and they still haven’t published that proposed rule,” she said. Similarly, she said the API had long lobbied the FAA to implement its Remote ID rule for drones, which the agency began enforcing in March 2024.
“We had been waiting a while for Remote ID; that was a three-year implementation timeline,” Lemieux said. “We think that when you have Remote ID, and then you have BVLOS, you can get to UTM [Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management] and you can really have expanded operations across industries, not just for us.”
She said a new BVLOS rule would enable routine long linear inspections of pipeline rights-of-way. Some companies are currently permitted perform such inspections, but they must go through the FAA’s costly and time-consuming BVLOS waiver process.
More frequent inspections via drone would enhance pipeline safety, by enabling companies to assess when a leak or rupture is likely to occur. “If you can fly a drone and you can have that automated feed come back and do it routinely you can sense when those changes happen, when a spill might happen,” she said.
Drones a well-establish safety tool
The energy industry has long used drones to promote safe operations by performing tasks considered too difficult of dangerous for humans to accomplish, Marty Robinson, senior robotics manage for Dow said on the sidelines of the conference.
“We use drones to do our internal inspections of tanks, both visual and now ultrasonic testing. We’ve been doing that for almost 10 years now,” he said.
Dow’s predominant use of drones is for visual inspections of hard-to-reach areas, such as flares, rooftops and the exterior of tanks, “anything that require large scaffolds or cranes to access.” The company also deploys UAVs to do volumetric surveys of landfills and to monitor levee conditions on some of its waterways.
Tank inspections though represent one of the best examples of the ways in which drones make workplaces safer. Having a human on top of a tank do an inspection represents an inherently hazardous job. “Not only is it elevated, but there also may be chemicals or hydrocarbons present,” Robinson said. That could require either employing a pre-screening technique to determine if it’s safe for a worker to be there, or if not, equipping the worker with breathing apparatus.
“By doing it via drone, we just reduce that time needed to have people on top,” he said. Unfortunately, the drones are not able to fulfill all the tasks needed for complete inspection. “But at least it does the primary inspection and reduces the man hours up there.”
Drones are also used to inspect the interior of tanks that have been evacuated of the material they had once held. Those confined spaces are filled with inert atmospheres, which are hazardous for people, although not for the drones.
Robinson said the company anticipates using drones more extensively in the future to do more complex tasks. Dow has recently begun using drones to do ultrasonic (UT) testing of equipment, using high-frequency sound waves both conduct internal and external tests to detect flaws without causing damage. “The next phase will be other types of non-destructive testing as well as manipulation from the drone,” he said.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.
For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.
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