Industries like mining and drilling would prefer to send vehicles, not people, to do the riskiest work, and the FAA faces its own hurdles in changing the law

If one of your duties is dangling from a rope while you try to check for corrosion and metal fatigue, a flying robot may be here to help soon.

When we read about drones, it’s usually an annoying hobbyist spying on sunbathers or a terrifying automated plane with a name like “Reaper” raining death on Afghanistan. But at the first-ever commercial drone conference, in Las Vegas this week, the talk among leaders of the dangerous and environmentally risky mining and drilling industries was of how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could both limit danger to employees and help avoid or triage the kinds of disasters that have cost those companies billions and irreparably harmed their relationships with the public.

The main thing standing in the way at the moment is the US government.



Drones, said Dave Truch, technology director of BP’s digital innovation organization, and many others at the Commercial UAV Expo, can do dangerous and onerous jobs much more efficiently than humans, and if they crash, you can buy another one. (Also, it won’t sue you: type “helicopter personnel basket transfer” – a particularly dangerous operation – into YouTube and one of the hits is an injury lawyer.)

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“What we bring out of the ground is held at extremes of pressure and temperature, and our job is to control it until we bring it into refineries,” said Truch at a breakout session on Tuesday. “Then we take this stuff that likes to explode and we cook it, at extremes of pressure and temperature, and we have to have all this infrastructure to control it. It gets very congested, sometimes so much so that we can’t even get humans into it.

“I have humans dangling from ropes, literally, to do some inspections,” said Truch. “Some of our vessels are 50 to 60ft high – that’s where we store stuff. Why would you put a human in there to do inspections? Because you have to. So we drain these vessels, we purge them, we make sure we have no residual hydrocarbon before we put a human in there, and we have to set up scaffolding, and then we have to send someone in there not only to do visual inspection but to take measurements.”

Mining and drilling are both highly regulated industries in the US, but in this case it’s not an energy regulator but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that is trying to figure out how best to allow companies like BP and Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold mining concern, to deploy drones on US soil.

To some extent, the FAA’s hands are tied: section 333 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 is strict on the topic of who can and can’t fly a drone (and where, and at what height, and how close to people).

Robert Pappas, who is in charge of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Integration at the FAA, said his team was working diligently – indeed, it is expanding – and he acknowledged that “small commercial UAS are projected to be the largest growth sector in the industry”.

But that doesn’t change the law. “There’s no sunset date for section 333,” he said bluntly. “Until Congress repeals or eliminates it, it will still exist.”

Amazon’s attempts to make drone-to-house delivery a reality have met with resistance largely because the drones would operate over the heads of the general public (the “Skynet” jokes have come thick and fast since the company announced its plans), but miners and drillers are asking for special consideration so they can use drones on their own properties.

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The companies presenting at the conference (where the FAA gave a presentation saying that some of the changes the industry wants are as far as three years away) said that drones had actually made their foreign (and thus drone-filled) sites safer.

“I’ve been involved in the implementation of UAV product since we established in the beginning five years ago,” said Jhon Ozoria, senior surveyor with Barrick, to a rapt audience at Caesars Palace. “It was driven by the needs of the difficult terrain and the cost.”

Ozoria works with drones at Barrick’s 19-year-old Pueblo Viejo gold mine in the Dominican Republic, about 60 miles away from Santo Domingo.

“We want to have no more people in the pits,” Ozoria told the audience at the commercial UAV conference – and drones have helped further that goal. “The curve of learning is really fast. I mean, it depends on the people around you, but it’s really easy, guys.”

Mine pits (and the corresponding piles of rubble and slag) have to be measured constantly; often this requires people to walk or drive off-road vehicles around loose terrain that, even with safeguards, can collapse. Frequently, miners have to climb to the tops of huge mounds of gravel with a Mosaic staff in one hand, at the top of which is mounted a GPS beacon that will tell how high the pile is. A wrong step and the miner can break a leg or worse.

“If you have UAV needs and you want to fly, come to DR,” said Ozoria succinctly.

Regulations currently require that a drone operate 500ft away from “non-participants” – that’s a deal-breaker for Freeport-McMoRan, a gold and copper mining company that is trying to implement drones into its stateside operations. The rules also require that the drone stay constantly within the line of sight of the user – something that often defeats the machine’s purpose for inspectors who’d like to have less dangerous jobs.

“You effectively have to clear your site before you survey your site,” said Leon DuPlessis, a chief engineer at the company. It’s a frustrating requirement, he said. “We have a population density of 0.075 people per hectare. If we had a loss link event and a loss of GPS signal, we would expect a random chance of striking a person once every 135,000 years.” And even that, he said, is in the worst-case scenario, in which the drone crashes rather than landing itself, as most now do.

Dyan Gibbens, founder and CEO of drone company TrumbullUnmanned, which contracts to BP and others in the industry, said there were other uses for the devices, as well – drones “can be used to document, detect and deter theft”, she said. Tens of billions of dollars in losses can be attributed to equipment theft and even oil theft – pipelines are long and hard to inspect and thieves often set up shop in a remote location where they can siphon as much as they can carry and then sell it.

The other requirement – and one that is due to ease slightly next year, if proposed drone rules don’t change – is that if an employee is using a drone “for furtherance of business”, even if it’s six inches square and being used exclusively to annoy a coworker, someone in the team operating the drone has to have a pilot’s license.



The proposed rules change that slightly – drones under 55lbs would require only a written test to operate – but it’s still a major sticking point as companies try to make drones easier to use.

Paul Doersch, the 27-year-old CEO of Kespry, said his company was trying to make its drones as simple and cheap as possible – as with everything derived from military technology, the early-generation drones are still wildly expensive – and to sell them on a lease model of $25,000 per drone per year. “The goal is to make it so that a manager at a mine just has to call up Kespry, open the box, push a button, and ‘click!’” said Doersch.

But until the three-year-long FAA “Pathfinder” project is over, the regulator seems unlikely to budge. The program is exploring “beyond visual line of sight” (BVLOS – everything is an acronym; there are a lot of engineers involved) drone operation with railroad BNSF. Everyone at the conference was deeply jealous.

Gibbens is sympathetic to the FAA’s perspective – her father worked for the regulator – and said that she hoped the FAA would “continue Pathfinder programs and share lessons learned” from them. She also said it would be helpful if they’d make the process of applying to use drones on one’s work site something an applicant could do on a computer.

Barrick’s chief surveyor at a mine in Nevada, Ben McKnight, said many in the industry were “desperate to be part of the Pathfinder programs”.

“I think it’s a great way to start pushing beyond visual line of sight,” he told his audience. “We’ve gotta take these baby steps or we’re not going to take any steps at all.”

And ultimately, Truch said, it’s becoming a question of labor, as well. “There’s a whole new generation and they’re not coming to work for us,” he said. “They don’t want to hang from the ropes and they don’t want to drive the trucks; they want to use technology.”