Terra Drone Expands Oil-and-Gas Inspection Services to Brazil

Japanese drone provider Terra Drone Corporation and Brazilian company Plimsoll UAV last week announced a joint venture called Terra Drone Brazil.

Terra Drone specializes in commercial drone hardware, software and UTM. The company focuses on the mining, construction, energy generation, oil and gas sectors, using UAS-based LiDAR and photogrammetry surveying solutions.

Plimsoll focuses on drone inspections of floating production storage and offloading system for oil and gas companies. Brazil maintains the largest number of such offloading systems in the world. In addition to the joint venture, Terra Drone bought a majority stake in Plimsoll.

“With this agreement, we are capable of providing the most updated technical know-how of 3D surveying and hard and soft technology to enhance the wide network in Brazil that has been established by Plimsoll UAV,” Terra Drone CEO Toru Tokushige said.

Tokushige added the company is looking to expand its nine branches all over the world and is focusing on providing more UAS solutions to mining, oil and gas sectors.

Recent Terra Drone expansions include:

• January: Created a partnership with Sibanye-Stillwater, the largest producer of gold in South Africa, to provide inspection drone services.
• December: Bought a major stake in Australian data firm C4D Intel.
• October: Joined forces with Unifly to create a drone traffic management system for Hitachi.
• 2017: Launched new image processing software – Terra Mapper – to optimize drone surveying services. The platform is an automated drone navigation, image processing, and 3D image analysis program that is available in both cloud and desktop versions.

For gas and oil companies, the new reality is: There Will Be Drones (oily movie pun intended).

• Colorado-based SolSpec has developed an online asset management tool that allows users to visualize and extract information specific to pipeline construction and operations. The drone system has already mapped 3,000 miles of pipeline for several Fortune 500 oil and gas pipeline operators and delivers critical project data which, for one client, saved more than $10 million.
• CyPhy Works, Inc. and Pilot Thomas Logistics now provide drone services for a variety of players across in the oil and gas sector, deploying CyPhy’s Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance and Communications (PARC) system.