Bio-sensors for real-time oil leak detection and long term environmental monitoring

​Biota Guard represented by Inge Dragsund, reported during an OSIsoft User Conference about the use of bio-sensors for real-time leak detection and long term environmental monitoring and decision support to the oil and gas industry. 

Instruments based on chemical or physical mechanisms are insufficiently sensitive or economically infeasible, but the use of instrumented animals, acting as bio-sensors are extremely sensitive and can measure toxicity as well.   The blue mussle is a good example of an important animal that is common on the bottom of the seas where oil and gas platforms are operated, and an important element of the ecosystem.  Instrumenting the mussle to measure its movements, in particular when it closes to protect itself because of pollution, is a good real-time KPI for presence of traces of oil, while its heart rate is a good indication of the long-term effects of pollution.  

The PI System is used to gather the real-time data and to perform calculations.  In the development stages the system provided efficient access to a pluridisciplinary team of medical doctors, data scientists, biologists, toxicologists, etc.   Via an interface, multivariate analysis was used to analyse the data.  This increased sensitivity and established the correlation with operational data.  Using Matlab predictive model was constructed to provide real-time feedback to the platform operators about the amounts released.  The model is complex and based on a large number of behavioural and physiological paramters measured in real-time and is condensed in a KPI, the stress level of the animals, that is capable of predicting under water leaks and emissions at several hundreds of meters of distance.  The industry challenged the solution for sensitivity and repeatability and the result was a certification using methods similar for other leak detectors, with the difference that it can detect concentrations from 0.05 ppm upwards, which is far more sensitive than any other commercial leak detectors.   

Biota guard recently passed a qualification process at Shell for new technology. The company succeeded in providing reliable and highly sensitive real-time decision support for subsea oil leaks, and gaining industry acceptance, amongst others by using the OSIsoft PI platform for process and sensor data, as well as connectivity to analysis and modeling tools.  The full presentation can be viewed at: http://www.osisoft.com/Templates/item-abstract.aspx?id=10450​