California Resources Corporation Customer Success Story

CRC was looking for a way to easily pull data from the field and upload it to a centralized place, a process that would allow the right people to have access to all aerial visuals while analyzing remotely.

Using DroneDeploy, CRC could send out a team of pilots to fly several different areas of land and upload those captured images, videos, and panoramas to the cloud, enabling their analysts to work from accurate maps and models without the need for radios or similarly faulty communication techniques.

Drone Operations Management

Effective communication is especially key considering CRC, a 1,500 employee company, currently has 26 licensed drone pilots with a plan to grow that number to more than 100. With such a large operating fleet, it’s imperative things are running smoothly while accurately capturing their assets. 

In the last year, CRC has deployed drones daily to help save time, money, and increase operational efficiencies. 

CRC holds the largest privately-held mineral acreage in the state, consisting of 2.2 million net acres spanning the state's four major oil and gas basins. With such a large span of land, CRC was finding it difficult to construct an accurate digital property record of these millions of acres, with 95% of their assets absent from a centralized database. When they implemented drones in their operations, a solution was finally at hand.

But how could CRC properly track their pilots were flying the same plots of land, using the most precise flight plans, without doubling up on work? 

With Drone Operations Management, CRC could automatically collect detailed flight logs for all drone flights, filter through specific individuals, projects, and timescales, and create custom pre-flight checklists with responses automatically recorded against the flight record. This enhanced visibility to their operations across the entire team by maximizing data capture. CRC found this could scale its program without delays, mistakes, or extra costs, allowing them to capture all of their assets, across the millions of acres of land, in just a fraction of the time. This also gave them the peace of mind knowing all pilots were flying safely and in compliance.

Improved Inspections

Inspections are one of the most vital aspects of an oil & gas company’s operations. Inspections can be used to detect dangerous methane or H2S gas leaks, ground subsidence of well pads, or flare stack anomalies. What CRC finds so advantageous about using drones for inspections is that they can go from being reactive to any repairs needed to be done, to proactive in preventing such repairs in the first place.

CRC used DroneDeploy topo flights to monitor anomalies that would otherwise be missed by performing inspections manually. Humans cannot always detect the minute cracks that can appear on the ground surface location, so CRC had a major need for some type of device in lieu of the human eye. The tiltmeter they were using, however, was exorbitantly priced, sometimes costing as much as $7,000 each. Another drawback of the tiltmeter was that it had to be dug deep underground for installation, adding several unnecessary hours to the production schedule.

The drones could be deployed to run regular flights and detect any anomalies; CRC could then be alerted to any irregularities. By using drones and thermal imagery, not only could they detect such instances accurately, they could act faster, saving both time and money.