Real time pipeline protection and assurance
Proceedings Publication Date
Presenter
Henry Stephenson
Presenter
Author
Henry Stephenson
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Abstract
Optical fibre is increasingly being deployed in many oil and gas applications. It is now regularly used to provide high bandwidth telecommunications and infrastructure for data capture and transmission, and is increasingly being used to sense pressure, temperature and strain, both along buried pipelines, on subsea pipelines and down hole. In this paper we present results from the latest sensing capability using standard optical fibre including Third Party Interference, Leak Detection and PIG Tracking Toolkits. With Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) an optical fibre is used for both sensing and telemetry. In this paper we present results from the OptaSense® system that when connected to a standard single-mode fibre (deployed next to a pipeline) can use the fibre to listen to the acoustic, seismic, temperature and strain activity at every 10 meter interval. We will show that each of the 4,000 independent, simultaneously sampled channels can be used to detect and locate leaks on the pipeline, using a sophisticated algorithmic approach that incorporates multiple characteristics of leaks in a rule based approach to leak detection and alerting that is robust to a variety of environments and leak types.