UAV Inspection for Oil & Gas

TL;DR

A drone inspection survey for oil & gas uses a UAV to capture high-resolution visual, radiometric-thermal and geometric data on the assets that are hardest and most dangerous to reach on a live LNG plant, refinery or gas field — flare tips and stacks, pipe racks and elevated piping, storage-tank roofs and shells, columns, vessels, cooling towers and gathering-line corridors. Industrial Spatial Solutions flies CASA Part 101 operations under permit-to-work and hazardous-area discipline, geotags every finding to GDA2020/MGA2020 and AHD, and returns a located, severity-rated work list your integrity engineers can action — without rope access on a live flare, scaffolding around a tank shell, or a person in a hazardous zone.

Key takeaways

• A drone inspection survey for oil & gas replaces rope access, scaffolding and crane-mounted EWP on the assets that drive integrity spend — a 60 m flare stack, a congested pipe rack, a floating-roof tank or kilometres of gathering line are inspected from a safe standoff with no person at height and, for flare and stack work, often without taking the unit offline.
• Inspection is not dimensional control or a clash-detection scan: visual and radiometric-thermal capture (DJI Zenmuse H20T / M3T) finds flare-tip erosion and coke build-up, corrosion under insulation telltales, tank-roof and shell deterioration, refractory hot-spots, fugitive-emission sources and CUI-driven pipe-rack section loss, with each defect geotagged to GDA2020/MGA2020 so an integrity crew returns straight to it.
• Optical-gas-imaging and radiometric-thermal payloads flag hydrocarbon leaks and hot equipment — flare-tip and stack shell hot-spots, failing steam traps, blocked passes on fired heaters and overheating motors — at delta-T thresholds well below visible failure, supporting LDAR programs and turning reactive callouts into planned shutdown scopes.
• Every commercial flight runs under a CASA Part 101 ReOC by licensed RePL pilots, planned around hazardous-area classification (AS/NZS 60079), the operator's permit-to-work and isolation system, and the facility's UAV management plan — with intrinsically safe procedures and exclusion zones agreed before mobilisation.
• Indicative pricing runs from roughly AUD 2,500-4,500 for a single asset (a flare stack, a tank or a fired heater) to AUD 150-400 per kilometre of pipeline or gathering-line corridor, with annotated, located reports typically returned within 3-5 business days.

Why oil & gas operators inspect from the air

Australia's oil and gas industry is, in practice, an LNG industry — around 80 million tonnes exported in FY2024-25 for roughly AUD 65 billion — and it runs through a concentrated set of world-scale, capital-intensive assets: the North West Shelf, Pluto, Gorgon, Wheatstone and Prelude FLNG off Western Australia; Ichthys and Darwin LNG in the Northern Territory; the three Curtis Island trains at Gladstone; the Cooper and Surat basin gas fields; and the Lytton and Geelong refineries. Every one of those assets carries a relentless integrity-inspection obligation, and almost all of the equipment that matters is high, hot, pressurised, insulated or inside a hazardous area. Traditional inspection methods are all expensive, slow or dangerous: a rope crew working a 60 m flare stack, scaffold built around a tank shell or a fractionation column, a crane-mounted EWP nosing into a congested pipe rack, or a technician walking kilometres of gathering line chasing a corroded coating.

A drone inspection survey collapses that risk and cost at once. A UAV holds station two to ten metres off the structure, captures imagery that resolves a hairline crack, a corroded weld, coke build-up on a flare tip or a CUI telltale staining insulation, and does it without anyone leaving the ground, hanging off a stack or entering a classified zone. A flare inspection that would demand a full unit shutdown and a rope team can, in many cases, be flown on a running flare from a safe standoff; a thermal pass that would take days of manual checks runs a fired heater or a pipe-rack corridor in an afternoon. On the north-west coast, where cyclone exposure and salt air drive aggressive external corrosion, that inspection cadence is not optional — it is what keeps a plant insurable and producing.

The applications cluster around the assets that are hardest and most dangerous to reach:

• Flares and stacks — flare-tip and pilot condition, coke and erosion, stack-shell corrosion, ladder and platform steelwork, and refractory hot-spots on the shell, inspected without taking the flare offline.
• Pipe racks and elevated piping — external corrosion, coating breakdown, support and shoe condition, and corrosion-under-insulation telltales across congested, multi-level racks that are slow and hazardous to scaffold.
• Storage tanks — fixed and floating-roof condition, shell corrosion and coating breakdown, seal condition, wind-girder and stairway steelwork, and roof-drain and appurtenance condition, captured from above and around the shell.
• Columns, vessels and fired heaters — external shell and insulation condition, platform and ladder steelwork, fired-heater convection-section and stack hot-spots, and thermal mapping of refractory and tube-skin temperatures.
• Gathering lines and pipeline corridors — coating condition, exposed pipe, ROW encroachment, third-party interference and leak indications across the long, remote runs typical of Surat and Cooper basin fields.

Key point: The single most common mistake we see is buying an inspection that produces pretty pictures but no location. A photo of a corroded support with no coordinate is almost useless next cycle. Every ISS inspection finding is geotagged to GDA2020/MGA2020 — and tied to the asset's own tag or circuit ID — so an integrity crew returns straight to the fault rather than re-finding it across an identical pipe rack or a hundred near-identical supports.

What a drone inspection captures: visual, thermal and gas

ISS matches the sensor to the failure mode the integrity team is chasing.

Visual inspection

The workhorse is high-resolution zoom imagery from a payload such as the DJI Zenmuse H20T, flown two to ten metres off the asset. At that standoff a single frame resolves a delaminating coating, a corroded pipe support, exposed steel on a tank wind girder, or the rust-staining telltale of corrosion under insulation on an insulated line — the deterioration that drives a circuit's remaining-life and re-inspection interval. Imagery is captured systematically — support by support, level by level, course by course on a tank shell — so coverage is complete and repeatable between cycles, not dependent on where a technician happened to point a camera from the ground.

Thermal and optical-gas inspection

Radiometric thermal — a true temperature-per-pixel sensor, not a colourised visual — is what makes drone inspection indispensable on fired equipment. A thermal sweep of a fired heater maps tube-skin temperatures and convection-section hot-spots, flags refractory breakdown on a stack or flare shell as a hot zone bleeding through the lining, and finds failing steam traps and overheating motors and drives across the unit, all without scaffolding. On a flare, a thermal pass shows shell hot-spots and abnormal tip behaviour that signal coke build-up or burn-back. Where the question is fugitive emissions, an optical-gas-imaging (OGI) payload visualises hydrocarbon and methane plumes at flanges, valves, connectors and tank seals, supporting leak-detection-and-repair (LDAR) programs and emissions reporting from a standoff that no handheld OGI camera can safely reach. Thermal and OGI must be flown with the plant under representative load and in valid ambient conditions, which is a planning discipline, not an afterthought.

Confined-space and internal inspection

Where the asset is internal and GNSS-denied — a storage tank during a clean-and-inspect outage, a vessel, the inside of a column, or a duct — ISS uses a collision-tolerant confined-space UAV to capture condition without scaffolding or a person entering the space. This is outage-critical: a visual record of internal shell corrosion, floor condition, tray and packing condition or refractory wear in hours rather than the days a scaffold-and-access approach demands, and without a confined-space entry permit for the inspection itself — a meaningful safety and schedule win on a turnaround burning hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.

Datums, georeferencing and defect tagging

What separates a survey-grade inspection from a hobbyist drone flight is that every finding has a defensible location. ISS is a surveying firm first, so inspection deliverables inherit the same spatial rigour as our scanning, dimensional-control and settlement-monitoring work on oil and gas plant.

Georeferencing. Flights are flown with RTK/PPK positioning and tied to the national framework — GDA2020 with MGA2020 grid coordinates (Zones 50-51 for most WA plants, 54-56 for the eastern states and Curtis Island) and AHD for heights — and registered to the plant's own control network and tag grid. That means a defect is not just "on a support near the pipe rack" but at a known coordinate and reduced level, repeatable next cycle and tied to the integrity circuit.

Defect tagging and severity. Each anomaly is logged with a location, a photograph, a sensor reading where relevant (delta-T for thermal, plume source for OGI), an equipment tag or circuit reference and a severity rating, so the report is a prioritised work list rather than a photo dump. Findings export to the formats your integrity-management and inspection-data systems already use, including geotagged imagery and GIS-ready point layers, and align with the risk-based-inspection and condition-rating schemes the operator runs under API 510/570/653 and AS/NZS 3788.

CASA Part 101 and hazardous areas. Every commercial flight ISS undertakes is conducted under a CASA Remote Operator's Certificate (ReOC), flown by pilots holding a Remote Pilot Licence (RePL), with controlled-airspace and aerodrome approvals arranged in advance. Critically for oil and gas, flights are planned around hazardous-area classification under AS/NZS 60079, the operator's permit-to-work and isolation system, ignition-source management, and the facility's UAV management plan and exclusion zones — agreed with the area authority before a rotor turns.

Key point: RTK georeferencing on an inspection flight is not about millimetre accuracy — it is about repeatability. The value of a flare, tank or pipe-rack inspection is comparing this cycle to the last to see what is deteriorating and feeding a defensible remaining-life calculation. That trend only exists if both surveys sit on the same datum and the defects are located against the integrity circuit, not just photographed.

Equipment and method

Oil and gas assets dictate the platform. Inspection happens at height, near hot and energised plant, around flammable releases and inside hazardous areas; pipelines run for kilometres across remote country; flares and stacks are tall and wind-exposed; internal spaces have no GNSS at all.

• DJI Matrice 350 RTK with Zenmuse H20T — integrated zoom RGB plus radiometric thermal, RTK-positioned and IP-rated, for flare stacks, pipe racks, tanks, columns and fired heaters in a single payload.
• DJI Mavic 3 Thermal (M3T) — compact radiometric platform for rapid pipe-rack, motor and fired-heater thermal sweeps and corridor work at high area rates.
• Optical gas imaging (OGI) payload — cooled mid-wave thermal for hydrocarbon and methane leak detection across LDAR scopes, flanges, valves and tank seals.
• Collision-tolerant confined-space UAV — caged platform with onboard lighting for tank interiors, vessels, columns and ducts in GNSS-denied conditions during shutdown.
• Photogrammetry payload (Zenmuse P1) — where geometry, stack verticality, tank shell ovality or structural deformation context is required alongside condition imagery.

Where geometric deformation rather than visual condition is the question, the same data ties back to total-station, Leica RTC360 and FARO laser-scan work and to Trimble GNSS control on the plant — so an inspection finding can be escalated into a measured deformation or dimensional-control survey on the same datum without re-establishing control.

Typical productivity: a single flare stack or tank in 1-2 hours; a fired heater or a pipe-rack section in half a day; a gathering-line corridor at 5-15 kilometres per flying day depending on thermal and coating detail. All sensors are calibrated with current certificates, backup platforms are held so an inspection is not lost to a single fault, and crews mobilise nationally to suit narrow shutdown and isolation windows.

Indicative pricing: a single asset inspection — a flare stack, tank, fired heater or column — typically runs AUD 2,500-4,500; pipeline or gathering-line corridor inspection AUD 150-400 per km; confined-space internal inspection during an outage AUD 5,000-15,000 depending on the space and access; an LDAR/OGI campaign scoped per facility. Every scope is fixed-priced after a site, access and hazardous-area review.

Standards and compliance

Drone inspection in oil and gas sits across aviation, hazardous-area, pressure-equipment and integrity-management frameworks. ISS delivers findings formatted for engineering and regulatory use.

ISS field crews hold the site and area inductions required at major LNG, gas-field and refinery operators, along with working-at-heights and confined-space tickets where ground support is needed. UAV operations run under a current CASA ReOC, flights are planned and permitted under the operator's hazardous-area and permit-to-work systems, and all field and processing work is managed within an ISO 9001-aligned quality system. Heights, where reported, are referenced to AHD and the plant datum so structural and integrity findings reconcile with the operator's existing records.

Key point: The most frequent gap we are asked to fix is an inspection program that captures images but never closes the loop on location, tag and trend. Risk-based inspection needs located, severity-rated, comparable findings tied to the integrity circuit, cycle on cycle — not a folder of undated photographs. That is the difference between an inspection that informs your remaining-life and turnaround spend and one that just satisfies a checkbox.

Why ISS for oil & gas drone inspection

ISS brings surveying discipline to inspection work that most drone operators treat as photography. The same firm that runs your brownfield laser scanning, dimensional control and settlement monitoring also flies your flare, pipe-rack, tank and corridor inspections — so the data is georeferenced on the same datum as the rest of your spatial records and drops into the same systems, rather than living as an orphaned image library.

We are built around live plant and shutdowns. Inspection lives or dies on access, isolation and hazardous-area control, and our crews mobilise nationally, work under permit-to-work, manage ignition sources in classified zones, and capture internal and at-height assets during the narrow turnaround windows when they are accessible. Findings are delivered as prioritised, located, severity-rated reports — not raw footage — so your integrity and reliability teams get a work list, not a viewing exercise.

Across LNG, refining and upstream gas, ISS inspects the assets that are too high, too hot or too dangerous to reach by hand — from the Pilbara LNG coast, Karratha and Darwin to Curtis Island, the Surat and Cooper basins, and the Lytton and Geelong refineries.

Frequently asked questions

What does a drone inspection survey for oil & gas cover?

It covers visual, thermal and gas inspection of hard-to-reach plant: flare tips and stacks; pipe racks and elevated piping, including corrosion-under-insulation telltales; fixed and floating-roof storage tanks; columns, vessels and fired heaters; and gathering-line and pipeline corridors. ISS captures high-resolution imagery, radiometric thermal and, where required, optical-gas-imaging data, geotags every finding to GDA2020/MGA2020 and the equipment tag, and returns a prioritised, located defect report aligned to your risk-based-inspection scheme.

Can you inspect a flare or live plant without a shutdown?

In many cases, yes. We hold station off the asset at a safe standoff, so much flare, stack, pipe-rack and tank-shell inspection is flown while the plant runs, planned around hazardous-area classification and the operator's permit-to-work system. Thermal inspection of fired heaters and rotating equipment is in fact best done under representative load. Where internal access — a tank or vessel interior — or any closer work is needed, it is planned around a shutdown and isolation window under permit, with crews holding the relevant working-at-heights and confined-space tickets.

How do you manage hazardous areas and ignition risk?

Every flight is planned against the facility's hazardous-area classification under AS/NZS 60079 and flown under the operator's permit-to-work, isolation and ignition-source-management system. Exclusion zones, standoff distances, gas-test requirements and the UAV management plan are agreed with the area authority before mobilisation, and our CASA Part 101 crews work to those controls. Where a classified zone cannot accommodate a flight under live conditions, the work is scheduled into the next isolation or shutdown window.

How accurate is thermal and OGI inspection at finding faults?

Radiometric thermal sensors measure temperature per pixel, so anomalies are quantified, not just visible — we map tube-skin and refractory hot-spots, failing steam traps and overheating drives, typically flagging components running well above their neighbours before failure. Optical gas imaging visualises hydrocarbon and methane plumes to locate leak sources for LDAR. Both depend on valid conditions — representative load, suitable ambient temperature and wind — so we plan flights for comparable, defensible results rather than flying opportunistically.

How are inspection findings delivered?

As a structured report, not raw footage: each defect carries a location (GDA2020/MGA2020 with AHD height), a photograph, a thermal or OGI reading where relevant, an equipment tag or integrity-circuit reference and a severity rating, compiled into a prioritised work list aligned to your API 510/570/653 and RBI scheme. Geotagged imagery and GIS-ready layers export into your integrity-management system so findings are comparable cycle on cycle. Reports are typically returned within 3-5 business days of the flight.

Request a quote

Whether you need a flare-stack and tip inspection, a pipe-rack CUI and coating survey, a tank roof-and-shell condition assessment, a fired-heater thermal sweep, an LDAR campaign or an internal confined-space inspection during a turnaround, ISS captures it from a safe standoff and returns located, prioritised findings your integrity engineers can act on.

1. Call 0407 057 015 to discuss your flares, tanks, racks and rotating-equipment assets.
2. Send your asset list, isolation constraints and inspection cycle — we will recommend the right sensors and flight method.
3. Book a site review — we confirm access, hazardous-area classification, permit-to-work and airspace requirements and return a fixed-price proposal.

ISS works across every major Australian oil and gas region, with CASA-certified crews and surveying-grade georeferencing on every flight.

Industrial Spatial Solutions — Precision drone inspection for Australian oil & gas infrastructure. Call 0407 057 015 or request a quote.

Related: Oil & gas surveying | UAV / drone surveys | 3D laser scanning | Mechanical surveys