ZALA AERO GROUP will start air monitoring of OOO LUKOIL-Komi's infrastructure facilities

ZALA AERO GROUP will start regular aerial monitoring of LLC LUKOIL-Komi's infrastructure facilities from July 2020.

This is the first time that such work on an industrial scale will be performed at the Company's facilities in the Komi Republic. Air monitoring will be carried out at oil and gas fields of the following territorial production enterprises: TPP LUKOIL-USINSKNEFTEGAZ, TPP LUKOIL-UKHTANEFTEGAZ and TPP LUKOIL-Severneftegas. The total length of pipeline routes surveyed during the period of work will be about 400,000 kilometres.

The requirements set by the work customer describe the best practices of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) application in the world. The main objective of aerial monitoring using UAS is to control the condition of the pipeline fleet, improve efficiency in ensuring industrial and environmental safety of hydrocarbon production and transportation facilities, and optimise costs of traditional monitoring methods.

ZALA specialists will set up control centres at each of the Company's CCIs in the region, where monitoring results from UAVs will be controlled. The control centres will ensure prompt interaction between OOO LUKOIL-Komi services and unmanned aircraft operators.

The ZALA UAVs will be used for aerial monitoring, which have the best technical characteristics in their class, equipped with a wide range of payloads with video, photo and thermal imaging modules, and meet all customer requirements.

For 10 years ZALA unmanned systems have been successfully used on a regular basis in the regions of the far north: YNAO, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug-Yugra, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), similar in climatic conditions to the area of work.

The air monitoring system will include automated data processing, for which ZALA will use specialised software based on neural networks - GEOGRAPHICS. This software is capable of processing up to 5,000 aerial photographs of a single flight in a short period of time, identifying objects of regular and irregular geometric shapes and possible functional or technological deviations.

From the experience of GEOGRAPHICS application at other oil production and transportation facilities, the efficiency of unmanned systems application is increased by no less than 30%, and the period of information processing and transmission is reduced by no less than 2 times.

ZALA AERO maintains its leading position in the provision of aerial monitoring services for fuel and energy companies. ZALA unmanned aerial systems are used in monitoring and aerial photography for more than 70% of all oil producing companies. ZALA flight units are based in almost every region of Russia and perform 80 to 100 sorties daily.

The application of ZALA technology in the oil and gas industry is based on a proven technology that has proved its effectiveness over 9 years. Before the introduction of aerial monitoring, regular inspection of infrastructure was a rather labour-intensive and costly process - traditional monitoring means were orders of magnitude more expensive and less efficient from the production point of view. The use of an unmanned aircraft is much more economical, allows us to increase the number of sorties, significantly improve the quality of monitoring, while reducing risks to the life and health of personnel.

Continuous updating of technologies, creation of intelligent software, development of new target loads with even better optics, allows the company to constantly improve the quality of remote sensing of the earth and provide the customer with monitoring results with a high level of detail and accuracy of measurements.