00:00:06 Speaker 1
Welcome to the Energy Pipeline Podcast with your host, KC Yost. Tune in each week to learn more about industry issues, tools and resources to streamline and modernize the future of the industry. Whether you work in oil and gas or bring a unique perspective, this podcast is your knowledge transfer hub. Welcome to the Energy Pipeline.

00:00:29 Russell Stewart
Hey, everybody. As always, thanks for listening today. Today we're broadcasting from Cera Week by S and P Global. We're here in Houston, Texas. For those of you who don't know, S and P Global is the world's premier energy conference. As a matter of fact, the Financial Times has called it the most important annual event on the energy industry's calendar. And so, of course, as always, OGGN is here at an important function like this and today's podcast. And if you're not familiar with CERA Week, you can go to Ceraweek C E R A W E E K saraweek.com and find out more. But, folks, today's podcast is so good, we're probably going to make it available to our OGGN audience on a couple of different podcasts because the presentation that I just saw over at Chevron's Agora House, it fits both HSE, which is, of course near and dear to my heart, but it also highlighted some industry tools and resources to modernize things and make things better in the oil field. And that's the Energy Pipeline Podcast sponsored by Caterpillar Oil and Gas. And so we're probably going to put this on both of those podcasts. And so let me introduce my guest real quick. My first guest is. Is Russell Robinson. Russell's with. With Chevron. Russell, thanks for coming on the show.

00:01:49 Russell Robinson
Thanks for having me.

00:01:50 Russell Stewart
Okay, Russell, let's start with you, and then let me introduce my second guest and we'll get get back to him in a minute. And guys, for those of you who listen to this podcast all the time, you know, we do like to brag about the fact that it is an international show and we even have a beautiful British voiceover that introduces the show. And then my Texas accent comes on, you know, so it's definitely, definitely. And I always screw up the names, you know, with my Texas accent. So I'm gonna try real hard here not to do that. My other guest is Ariel Aviton.

00:02:25 Ariel Avitan
Russell, that's perfect, man.

00:02:27 Russell Stewart
All right. That's the first time. That's absolutely the first time. Okay, well, thanks to both of you guys for coming on. Ariel, we're going to come back to you here in just a minute. But Russell, let's start with you and Chevron. Tell us about yourself and your role at Chevron.

00:02:42 Russell Robinson
Yeah, well, as he said, my name is Russell Robinson, and obviously Russell's a pretty awesome name here on the podcast.

00:02:47 Russell Stewart
Yeah, I like that name.

00:02:48 Russell Robinson
Yep. But, yeah, so I'm a program manager here at Chevron for our Facilities and Operations of the Future team. And Facilities and Operations of the Future, or fof, as we like to call it for short, is a technology program here at Chevron that has a vision of leveraging the power of connectivity, intelligence and autonomy. And by autonomy, we're talking about really, systems that are capable of operating and making decisions in real time with limited human intervention. And so for us at fof, it's really all around kind of our three value pillars. First and foremost, as you said, that's near and dear to your heart. It's how do we continue to remove humans from potentially hazardous environments? So what you'll hear a lot today is around how we're using robotics. Robotics for us is already showing to eliminate things like work at heights or entry into confined spaces, which is like a tank or a vessel, or in the case of what we'll speak to Percepto here and in our pilot, it's a lot around just drive time. We have drive. You know, we spend hours and hours and hours and hundreds of miles a day on the road for our operators to go to site. And in some cases, that's our greatest risk. So again, removing those risks, removing those hazards is a huge piece of what the FOF vision is. Secondly, it's again, it's about minimizing that potential environmental impact. This comes a lot of ways. You'll hear us talk about sensors and advanced cameras. That's key to helping us ensure that our systems are working as designed. And in that we're minimizing that environmental impact. And then the last, obviously, value driver is all around how do we continue to have a step change, like I like to call it, in our operating efficiency? So this, this is anything from reducing cost to increasing uptime of our assets, that productivity, that reliability increase, and really all around that. And that comes through a lot of technologies, not only through drones that we'll talk to today, but a lot of what the FOF portfolio has. So it's an exciting space. And hopefully we give a bit of real life examples of what we're working on today with Percepto in this FOF space.

00:04:55 Russell Stewart
Well, I'm glad to hear you say that last part because that's, that's something else that's near and dear to my heart, because I think we can effectively do health safety in the environment and it's more profitable by doing it better.

00:05:10 Russell Robinson
Absolutely. You're spot on. And that's where you'll see a lot of what we leverage Perceptos and other technology for really has an impact on all three, which is when we're prioritizing the innovation that we're working on. It's all about how do we continue to drive value and safety today, but also give us that Runway into the future that really has ways that we're just now learning the positive impacts from. So it's pretty exciting. So, yeah, it's. Absolutely. That's the trifecta that we strive for continuously.

00:05:43 Russell Stewart
All right, well then let's get to Ariel. So you mentioned robotics, you mentioned Percepto, and you mentioned drones. And the audience is saying, what the heck's he talking about? They haven't heard your presentation that I just heard a few minutes ago. So, so Ariel, you are what, co founder and CEO, is that right?

00:06:06 Ariel Avitan
And CRO.

00:06:07 Russell Stewart
CRO, yeah. Okay, so that's Chief Revenue Officer. Okay, so. And the company is Percepto.

00:06:13 Ariel Avitan
Exactly.

00:06:14 Russell Stewart
Okay, and you guys, you said robotics, Is that what you call a drone, A robot?

00:06:21 Ariel Avitan
Well, yeah, in many areas and industries, drone is a robot. What we do is basically provide a full end to end kind of solution for companies that would need to inspect their infrastructure and assets. So part of our solution is, of course, the robot, if you will, which is the drone in a box. It's a drone that has its own enclosure. The enclosure is on the site and the drone flies out of it, conducts the missions, comes back, charges, and then moves again to another flight. And this is continuous 2477 days a week. And you basically have a system that is on site and ready for any action, either preplanned or reactive. Right on a button. Notice we have the software that allows us to manage the drone and a number of drones at that. So we can have number of systems working around all the time and collecting data on a continuous basis. And then after that, there are the AI components of analyzing what you're seeing. So the drone flies around and uses different kinds of cameras and sensors to collect data. But then we take that data, we go through an analysis process where we're looking for anomalies or abnormal faults that will allow us to convert that to reports and send it to the client. And we do all of that in conjunction with our clients to make sure that we look for the use cases that will help our clients to be much more efficient in how they work and much more safe at how to work. So that's a bundle of what we do.

00:08:05 Russell Stewart
Okay, so who flies these drones?

00:08:08 Ariel Avitan
No one. No. The drones are conducting the missions autonomously. It's preplanned flights that we approve with our clients, of course, to make sure that everything is safe. And then we remotely operate these drones from our West Palm beach operations center. And based on a very unique waiver that we got from the Federal Aviation Administration that allows us to remotely operate up to 30 drones from one operator in our West Palm beach office.

00:08:41 Russell Stewart
Oh, wow. Wow.

00:08:43 Ariel Avitan
So that allows us to provide much. A lot of scalability to our clients. Right. And offer multiple systems flying around, collecting information in a very optimized and utilized way.

00:08:57 Russell Robinson
Yeah. And just to give context, I mean, we're flying missions from that Florida location in West Texas and Colorado for just these pilots. So that I would say that global, not global, that U.S. waiver that they have achieved is really valuable. Their pilots are able to launch missions or monitor missions, as we like to say. The drone does fly itself. But in addition, our own control rooms that we have throughout the US Are able to leverage that same technology so we can pilot our missions as well with their technology. And really that can be that continuous automated mission or an. In many cases, it's also a response. If we see something and we want indication, we want eyes on it, we don't even have to go through their control room. Our control room operators are trained and are able to launch a mission and immediately go out and look at that site from somewhere, wherever the drone is. So that's really powerful technology that is really giving us value today, but also is going to give us that speed to scale that we're going to need long term in our assets to really drive that efficiency at a much larger level. So it's pretty exciting.

00:10:03 Russell Stewart
Okay, so I picked that up in a presentation and I just was curious about logistics you talked about. Okay, so those guys can launch in Florida or actually they're in Florida. They launched the drone because the drone's on site there.

00:10:20 Ariel Avitan
Yes.

00:10:21 Russell Stewart
In its own little.

00:10:22 Ariel Avitan
In Texas.

00:10:23 Russell Stewart
Yeah. Okay. And it's containers. All right, so then you said your operations people. Where's this operations?

00:10:34 Russell Robinson
Yeah. So how does it work for us? For the assets where we're doing the pilot? We have two operations centers and control rooms. One is in Midland, Texas, that's controlling West Texas and New Mexico assets as a whole. And then we have one as well in Colorado that's monitoring our Colorado assets. So when I talk about where we're doing these pilots. Those are the two control rooms that do have that live feed. They have that ability to also monitor or take control of drone as needed. But as he said, it's really unique, the waiver they have where, yes, they have to have somebody that's giving overall monitoring of the systems, but essentially they just have to ensure that the system is clear for takeoff, push a button, the system runs itself, and then they're able to kind of more broadly monitor up to 30 systems at once, which is, which is pretty huge. And I think that's that first of a kind waiver that they have that they obtained from the faa. So. Yeah.

00:11:30 Russell Stewart
So you're doing this for Chevron in West Texas? Colorado and Colorado, yes. Out of Florida.

00:11:38 Ariel Avitan
Out of Florida, yeah.

00:11:38 Russell Stewart
Okay. You guys aren't New Jersey.

00:11:40 Ariel Avitan
No, no, no, no. Jersey.

00:11:42 Russell Stewart
I shouldn't have said that.

00:11:43 Ariel Avitan
Got that question a lot of times.

00:11:44 Russell Stewart
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have even said. Said that. I apologize for that. But one of the. And of course, our audience, I said while ago, is international in scope, but the truth of the matter is most, most, most of it is in Texas. Okay. And, you know, everything's happening out in West Texas, as we all know. So. So everybody will understand what I'm about to say here. There's a. There's a lot of wheel time in West Texas.

00:12:17 Russell Robinson
Yes, yes, sir.

00:12:18 Russell Stewart
And something that I immediately picked up on them in the presentation. And I had actually never really, really thought about it, but. So you got tons of guys out and of course, talking about safety, I mean, the driving thing in West Texas, that's, you know, that's the, that's the number one problem out there as far as, as far as safety goes. So now, you know, I'm the Chevron service operator, or, you know, whatever you call him. I'm checking these facilities. So I got to drive to this facility, I got to do my manual inspection or whatever, then I find a problem, then I got to drive back and figure out how to get what I need to. And so this, this drone technology, it just, it takes care of all of that. So you can immediately inspect, find a problem, then your operators who are monitoring this stuff can know about it in real time.

00:13:18 Ariel Avitan
Exactly.

00:13:19 Russell Stewart
And then rather than wasting a guy's time driving back, he just can make one trip and fix the problem. Right?

00:13:26 Russell Robinson
Yeah. Or in some cases, it's a false alarm. Right. You know, we have highly instrumented systems. Right. You know, our control rooms have a lot of access to sensors and Automation. So there's instances where, you know, maybe there's indication of a potential anomaly that that may be a false alarm. Right. And obviously safety and reliability is always paramount for us. So putting eyes and ears on equipment is typically always going to be the response to indication of issue. And so in many ways, we're eliminating those false alarms where we didn't have to put somebody on the road, because as you said, some of these sites from where they launch from their offices, you know, on the short side it's 30, 45 minutes, but on the long side, it's multiple hours. Right. And we're talking about, you know, highly remote areas in the middle of the night. In Colorado, a lot of the value driver for safety is really in the winter months when, you know, obviously ice conditions. So that's been a big part of the pilot is testing, you know, obviously their systems rated to working in from the desert to the, to the tundra or whatever, you want to consider it. But, you know, that's part of the pilot as well, is to test that reliability. So that's been really big. And then as you said, it's just the efficiency game of, okay, if there is an issue, they know what they're going into. They can deploy the right people with the right skills with the right equipment to fix that issue in a really quick manner. The last thing I would say is our control rooms are highly automated. And so in some cases, if there is an issue, they can fix the issue remotely.

00:14:56 Russell Stewart
You can actually do a remote fix, huh?

00:14:58 Russell Robinson
Yeah.

00:14:59 Russell Stewart
Which is even better.

00:15:00 Russell Robinson
Which is even better. So that's really where you start to see the integration of multiple technologies. Not only drones come together. You know, that, that sensors, those tech, those automation technologies in really powerful ways. And that's where we really see that step change in both safety and value for our company.

00:15:16 Russell Stewart
Okay, so I probably should phrase this question to make me really look smart, but I already know the answer because I heard it in the presentation. But I think a question that people would, would have out there, you mentioned your AI technology and you mentioned. And so we're using drones to keep people out of these facilities, you know, as much as remove them from the hazard as much as possible. And the knock on AI always is, well, yeah, you know, you're eliminating people's jobs and that sort of thing, but what you're actually doing here, and you used the word just a second ago, you're actually the people who have the jobs. You're just, you're making them. First of all, you're making them safer. But second of all, you're making them more efficient and they actually appreciate that, right?

00:16:05 Russell Robinson
Yeah. As I like to say, you know, using technology and being innovated has really been core to what Chevron's been for over 100 years in our kind of history of, of our company. And that doesn't change today. And I'll use some examples here where our operators are not only accepting of technology like this drone in the box, but they're using it in ways that we haven't even known or expected. Right. So they are always evolving their capabilities. They are the experts at what they do, they're experts at maintenance, at reliability, at safety. So as we give them these new tools, this new data feed, they're able to then do above and beyond what we would expect. So for instance, I think what we talk about is even during one of our demo flights with a lot of our superintendents, our higher level managers in kind of operations, just during the demo flight, they launched, they went and looked and they turned the thermal camera on and they were trying to show one thing and all of them in the room kind of lit up, I think is what they said and said, hey, that piece of equipment, that separator isn't working at an efficient level because we can see that, we can actually see the tank levels and they're not what they're supposed to be.

00:17:14 Russell Stewart
And you can see the tank levels.

00:17:16 Ariel Avitan
Because you have, there's a thermal camera on the drone that allows you to see it.

00:17:20 Russell Robinson
And so immediately they're like, hey, we can make a quick tweak to this and drive more efficiency or avoid a potential issue. So that's just, that's again, as you use technology, it's not about the elimination of those workers, it's about, about evolving what they do, making it safer, letting them do higher value work. The other thing I would say there is, we did a 90 day look back of our first pilot in West Texas, and I'll use the term equivalent time, but what the look back showed is we were able to take what we would say 1.5 equivalent operators time. So in a single day, if you take somebody's time, 12 hour shift and you take one and a half times of that, that's what we were able to take away from manual task and drive time and move to higher value work like frontline maintenance, which is huge. And that's what they want to be doing. That's what they're really good at.

00:18:09 Russell Stewart
Exactly.

00:18:10 Russell Robinson
They don't want to be driving and just looking at the Same piece of equipment every day, all day. Right. So that's been huge. And that's been, you know, if you look at it, that 150% increase or that 1.5 FTE time away from manual task has been really huge.

00:18:25 Ariel Avitan
Yeah. I think that when you look at systems like ours that are working in industries that have a heavy load of people on the ground. Right. We're just making sure that they get the proper information and status on what's going on there. So they're much more efficient when they come in on site. And they're coming not per timing, just because they need to be there, let's say once a week. But they're coming because there's an actual issue that they need to fix. And this augments the, it makes everything much more sense.

00:18:57 Russell Stewart
They're not wasting their time.

00:18:57 Ariel Avitan
Yeah. They're not wasting their time on things that could be redundant or things that are, you know, false positives, which is like a real big mess. Right. And the ability for the drone, for the machine to do that work, the heavy grunt of like collecting that information. Right. Making sure that the people that are already there and they do the good job that they need to do are doing the actual work of like fixing, of making sure things are safe. That, that's, you know, that's the actual work that we've been assigned for. And that's, that's our, I think is a true benefit of having these systems monitor on an ongoing basis.

00:19:29 Russell Stewart
Okay. So let's talk about the environmental impact here. Obviously, I guess the drone has the ability to detect a leak. I mean, a valve's all of a sudden gone, gone bad or something. And you know, you, like you said, it's way out there, two hours away from where anybody is. It could, you know, you could, you could be pouring produced water or oil or something else all over the ground for, you know, hours and nobody know or whatever. The drone picks up this kind of, kind of activity.

00:20:09 Russell Robinson
Yeah. I think, and I'll let you speak to this. You know, there's, there's really two types of cameras on there. There's obviously an rgb, which is a high definition camera. So that would be the same as you and I's eyes looking at issues.

00:20:22 Russell Stewart
We see it's leaking or whatever.

00:20:23 Russell Robinson
Yeah. And for us it's many different things that we're looking for. But you know, anomalies are one of them. And then I think speak a little bit to the OGI camera because that's not unique to chevron. Right. That's Kind of industry wide that's regulator wide. So speak a little bit from Perceptos point of view.

00:20:38 Ariel Avitan
As I'm guessing everywhere like in the industry knows where there's OGI cameras, optical gas imaging cameras that allow people on the ground to look for any leaks. What we did is we took a very sensitive OGI camera, put it on the drone, and that allows us to have an OGI capability of looking for possible leaks with a drone flying around. So it can cover much more ground, much more assets. Right. Than humans on the ground that have the camera handheld that allows us to collect that information if there is any possible leaks. We have AI capabilities that allow us to look at the data, automatically tag any possible areas of leaks and then provide that into the client. So the client can then further investigate and see if it's something that they want to address and in what severity. Right. Depending on what we're looking at. So that's a specific unique camera on a specific unique system. Right. That allows to check these kinds of issues at scale because like now they're flying, I can look at, you know, a lot of assets at the same day where as equivalent, someone would have to drive around with the camera. And also, you know, different angles, less visibility, we're flying from above, we can see much more. And that allows us to just provide better situational awareness to our clients.

00:21:59 Russell Robinson
Yeah. And it's really all around how do we continue to know that our assets are operating within their design limits. Right. And it's really huge. And that, as you said, has an effect on safety, that has an effect on, you know, our impact to the environment. But then that also has an effect on the overall kind of operating efficiency. So it's pretty powerful value case there for a lot of these situations.

00:22:24 Russell Stewart
You pick up methane emissions too?

00:22:27 Ariel Avitan
Yeah, The OGI camera is designed to pick up any, any methane based emission.

00:22:35 Russell Stewart
Okay. And so these. Okay, you've got the OGI camera on the, on the drone.

00:22:41 Ariel Avitan
Yes.

00:22:41 Russell Stewart
And, and you guys already have these sensors and everything already in your, in your facilities. Right. So that's what the.

00:22:49 Russell Robinson
Yeah, yeah. So in many cases it's about, you know, it's about how do you cost effectively monitor at a frequency that is appropriate in some cases. You know, the OGI cameras themselves are extremely powerful. And so having that ability to essentially get all different angles, all different times of day and have that kind of what we call 247 monitoring is a huge win for, for us and one of the big pieces of the puzzle for us.

00:23:19 Russell Stewart
Okay, so you mentioned something About. I heard you use the term a couple times and I actually heard it in the presentation as well. You haven't been doing this for long. This is like cutting edge stuff. You talked about pilot programs, you just. How long y'all been doing this?

00:23:40 Russell Robinson
Yeah. So I think if you talk about use of advanced technologies. Right. Again, we've been doing that for over 100 years. Right. But as you start to really get into again, because this is a bit of advanced sensors, advanced robotics type solutions, we've been doing that and we largely have tried to position ourselves as a leader in the industry and use of robotics especially. But until now it's largely been done on site and manually. Meaning, for instance, if we want to fly a drone, we have qualified pilots, but they would have to go to that site again, drive, do the work and then fly. And so the value is there, but in a small sense. Right. But now with Percepto and some of our other partners in different technology areas, it's really all about can you continue to do this remotely first and foremost, which. The answer is yes. Autonomous is. Which is yes. And then, and then you really get into the next layer of not only, you know, operating remotely, but also interpreting the information in a kind of an automated or autonomous way. And that's where some of the, you know, their early AI is really promising. And we're working with really across, across the landscape of partners in the AI space to take that data interpretation because that's really where that, that value even jumps even, even more. Right. Is. Is on the data interpretation side. So that's where I say there's value now, but there's a long Runway with Percepto and other partners on value into the future, which I think is exciting.

00:25:08 Russell Stewart
Yeah. So the future's now.

00:25:10 Russell Robinson
Futures now. Yeah.

00:25:13 Russell Stewart
So we're talking mostly here in this case, we're talking oil and gas upstream. Okay. Are you in other industries?

00:25:20 Ariel Avitan
So we do downstream, we have several systems deployed, deployed in different refineries. There we have two different systems, one with the OGI capability. The other one is with a radiometric camera that allows us to look at specific thermal changes. And that's a lot of different use cases, as you can imagine in a refinery. So in the oil and gas, we're basically focused on that upstream and downstream. We work in the TND space transmission distribution market, where we look at mainly in distribution lines and fly around and look at different poles, looking for different anomalies there. And we're deployed from substations and fly around. We have systems in heavy industrial sites, chemical plants, automotive, like, we have systems there mainly for security, but also for different other use cases that they're specific to that kind of deployment.

00:26:20 Russell Robinson
Yeah. And I think that's why it's exciting for us as well, because as you know, Chevron operates many different types of assets. Right. So having, you know, technology that we can prove and then expand into other areas or other sites or other use cases is important for us because again, that speed to scale and value across kind of a breadth of what we do is super critical. And it's one of the main kind of drivers to where we're, you know, we make some, some investments in technology. So that's a big win for us that they're not just in one specific use case, but they can come in and bring their expertise in utilities, which obviously we operate our own utilities, etc. It's really powerful.

00:26:57 Russell Stewart
Okay, we got to wrap this up, but I want to. I got one more question I have to ask. But I want to say, first of all, as we wrap it up, thanks to Chevron for inviting us to the presentation. Thanks for coming on and promoting this. And OGGN is a huge advocate for the oil and gas industry. And so we're always glad to get, especially companies like Chevron to come on and let the people know that, you know, hey, as I always say, the oil and gas industry is not the problem with the environment. The oil and gas industry is going to be the solution to the environment. And I think that's what's happening. Ariel, glad to present Percepto to our audience and we'll definitely put your website.

00:27:45 Ariel Avitan
Thank you.

00:27:45 Russell Stewart
Contact information in the show notes. One final question, though. So you're flying these things, how do you keep from running into something else?

00:27:57 Ariel Avitan
Very, very good question. So we have airspace mitigation. The drone itself has an ADS B collector, meaning it looks for any aircraft in the area and allows us to perform a DAA detect and avoid maneuver if there is any aircraft coming in. And then of course, we have our own mitigations that have to do with the site setups. We fly very low in heights that no plane is supposed to fly in and in areas that are quote, unquote shielded. So we fly near assets that no normal pilot should fly fly near. So we have layers of mitigation and of course, all approved by, you know, our waiver process with the FAA and.

00:28:43 Russell Stewart
All that sort of thing. Okay, that's great. Well, that's cool. Again, guys, thanks for coming on. Thank you, Russell. Everybody, as always, thanks for listening. Tell your friends to listen. Post us on LinkedIn. If you looking for a speaker for your conference or sales meeting or whatever, reach out to oggn. We have those resources and we'll see you next time.

00:29:06 Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. Don't forget to sign up for our weekly news newsletter. The show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.