A visual walkthrough of how Prime Sentinel inspects live oil & gas infrastructure — autonomous drone surveillance across long-distance overground pipelines, and magnetic crawler NDT inside the confined process pipework of the Chevron-operated Agbami FPSO.
Overground and elevated pipelines crossing long distances of open terrain — inspected continuously, autonomously, and without crew exposure. Optical, thermal and ultrasonic sensors detect leaks, corrosion and thermal anomalies in real time.
A Prime Sentinel inspection drone flies pre-programmed routes along surface and elevated oil & gas pipelines — covering tens of kilometres per sortie across remote terrain, swamp, and right-of-way without dispatching a ground crew.
Each drone carries a synchronised sensor stack — high-resolution optical, FLIR thermal, and ultrasonic stand-off probes — capturing weld, coating, and surface condition data at survey speed against the pipe material profile.
Live sensor feeds are compared at the edge against a reference library of millions of pipe conditions. Leaks, oil seepage, corrosion patches, pressure anomalies and dimensional deviations are scored and flagged immediately — no shutdown required.
Where drones cannot reach — inside the tightly packed process deck of a producing FPSO — the Prime Sentinel crawler delivers the same NDT scope an offshore inspection team would perform. Wall-thickness, corrosion mapping and weld integrity, measured in place, on live pipework.
Agbami is one of Chevron's flagship deepwater assets — a turret-moored Floating Production, Storage and Offloading vessel approximately 320 metres long, processing crude continuously offshore Nigeria. Drones can survey the topsides; the confined process deck cannot. That is where the Prime Sentinel crawler takes over.
The Prime Sentinel magnetic crawler clamps directly to ferrous process pipework — vertical, horizontal, or overhead — and traverses around flanges, valves and supports inside the FPSO's tightly packed module spaces. It works alongside production, with no hot-work permit and no rope-access spread.
Onboard ultrasonic (UT) thickness gauges, phased-array probes, HD optical and lighting capture wall-thickness loss, internal corrosion, pitting, weld defects and coating condition — the same NDT checks an offshore inspection team would perform, delivered remotely and logged straight into the integrity dashboard.
Drone surveys of overground corridors and crawler NDT inside FPSO process decks feed the same Prime Sentinel integrity dashboard. Operators move from reactive, permit-heavy inspection campaigns to continuous, AI-driven asset intelligence — reducing shutdowns, exposure hours, and unplanned losses across onshore and offshore portfolios.
Co-developed by Prime Teknologies UK and Prime Digital Tek Nigeria, in partnership with Brobags Limited.
