Potential benefits of PRESENSE

Major savings are anticipated by replacing conventional monitoring techniques with remote surveillance sensing and employing advanced data processing of imagery to supply feature identification with improved response times compared with current practice.

Russ Pride, project manager at Advantica, says there are three key areas which hold particular interest for European pipeline operators participating in the programme; "Our top priority is to assess how satellite monitoring from space could be used to identify and anticipate third party interference, such as tractors and large earth moving equipment, to the pipeline network.

The second area of concern is land movement or landslip and the third is gas leakage."Current pipeline monitoring is undertaken routinely using a number of techniques, the most common being "flying-the-line" using helicopters or fixed wing aircraft with trained observers on board. These routine and regular flights perform a key role but they are expensive and bear the inherent safety concerns of all helicopter flights."