Skyports trials on-demand drone deliveries to North Sea oil rigs

UK drone delivery and advanced air mobility infrastructure startup Skyports has launched trials of on-demand UAV equipment provisioning flights to North Sea oil rigs in partnership with its Norwegian energy client, Equinor.  

The company said its Skyports Drone Services unit began the two-month series of test flights earlier in September, and has already completed scores of what are expected to be hundreds of deliveries to Equinor oil rigs with required equipment.

In addition to the principlel transport activity, the program will also explore other facets of the automated UAV operation process, including – once regulator approval has been obtained – navigation in heavy rain, fog, wind, and other hostile conditions.

Under the partnership, Skyports is staging daily, on-call drone flights of equipment, urgent supplies, and care packages for employees of Equinor’s Gullfaks oil field from a processing site in Norway’s the west coast city of Mongstad. Those aerial delivery missions are almost entirely automated, and monitored by Skyports technicians in a remote piloting center in Bergen. 

Human intervention is largely limited to platform crew trained for the trial offloading transported payloads and switching batteries when necessary. In addition to drone flights between the shore and rigs – its longest UAV operations to date, Skyports says – the tests are also making deliveries between Equinor platforms themselves.

The objective of the trials is to establish regular use of UAVs as a faster, more affordable, and less polluting option of transporting limited weight equipment compared to current boat and helicopter methods. Awaiting approval of authorities, test flights will also be flown in harsh weather conditions that legacy vehicles can’t or prefer not to brave. 

As it has done in the past, Skyports is deploying Australian drone company Swoop Aero craft for the current Equinox delivery trials – in particular, the startup’s most recent Kite UAV, with a 5-kilogram payload and 175-kilometer flight capacity. 

Skyports Drone Services director Alex Brown says the robust, weather-resistant designs of those craft are already contributing to trial goals of demonstrating the effectiveness, affordability, and sustainability of drone deliveries to offshore assets.

“This project with Equinor proves that drone delivery can offer a safer, cost-effective, more sustainable alternative to conventional transport methods in offshore environments,” says Brown. “The offshore energy sector is perfectly placed to benefit from drone deliveries due to the inherent time-sensitive nature of working offshore, as well as the extreme remoteness and ruggedness of operations. We are currently exploring how we can expand this groundbreaking work into adjacent sectors such as offshore wind and ship resupply.”