STORM - Safety Tool for Operators and Remote Monitoring in Early Leak Detection

Gas leaks in the oil and gas installations represent a safety risk, as if they are ignited, they may result in severe fires and explosions. As the conventional gas detectors, widely used, require gas to enter a fixed-point gas or pass through the path of a linear detector, this existing technology can be unreliable in open areas especially due to wind direction. Automatic detection sometimes fails, and it is by manual means that the alarm is raised, usually when personnel see or hear a release. To improve those performances, a solution is to add more detectors to cover larger zone, but this increases the cost of maintenance of these gas sensors.

The R&D Safety monitoring & crisis Project, one of the components of the Safety R&D theme, selects or develops suitable new solutions (real time, continuous, connected...) of early gas detection from the optical or acoustic sensors to the networks of complete systems on an efficient and optimized cost way. The main benefits of these new technologies are to identify and quickly stop the sources of gas which are detrimental for the safety but also for the environment. Unlike conventional gas detectors and Ultrasonic Gas Leak Detectors which trigger a zone alarm, the complementarity of the optical and acoustic sensors detects, precisely locates the source of the gas leak, visualize the gas plume and classifies the leak rate at a lower cost.

Sensitive to all types of gas, the acoustic technology can be a source of real added value in oil and gas, but also in the energy transition : in production and storage of low carbon energies such as hydrogen or biogas or in Carbon Capture and Storage. Besides, this technology anticipates remote monitoring of future remotely operated sites.

Digital transformation is ongoing in energies industry to maximize operations and asset performance with advanced analytics to improve profitability. But along with challenges of implementing digital changes, there are also numerous opportunities for better safety.

The Real Time Risks and Impact Monitoring project, part of the Safety R&D theme using data science, aims to develop a tool capable of on-the-fly cross-referencing of data from different sources, including new generation detectors, to generate high-level synthetic information directly usable by the operator. It is the extension of the Safety monitoring component dedicated to testing and qualifying innovative leak detection and quantification technologies. Our objective is to develop a real-time help making tool and to propose both physical and software solutions for decision support in the event of anomalies in the context of standard and remotely operated operations of TotalEnergies company. By concentrating on a single tool information dispersed before today on several software and screens and by presenting it in an easily understandable form, the application STORM (Safety Tool for Operators and Remote Monitoring) will make it possible to alleviate the mental load of the operator and his stress in the event of detection of anomaly. The ultimate goal is to provide the right information, at the right level, in the right form and at the right time to ensure more efficient decision-making process and without stress.