Accelerating Robotics at Deer Park

Throughout the world, businesses are embarking on digital transformation journeys and adopting disruptive, digital technologies in countless different ways to make work more productive and exciting while extracting measurable data and business value.

Shell Deer Park has embraced the digital transformation with the use of industrial robotic applications. These applications range from fixed, fit-for-purpose physical machines that can perform high-volume, repetitive tasks to more mobile, autonomous vehicles that can move around to cover larger areas.

Today’s robotics cover a broad range of autonomous mobile machines that can crawl (crawler robots), and fly (drones) to increase operational efficiency, asset reliability while reducing costs and improving safety.

At Deer Park robots are used to detect anomalies that go unnoticed by the human eye and perform tasks to help augment human work and provide enhancements in workplace safety and productivity.

Since 2017, Deer Park’s in-house drone program employs FAA-certified drone pilots to complete aerial surveys as part of the site’s maintenance, inspection and emergency response activities, including serving as a standby for the Channel Industry Mutual Aid (CIMA) system in the greater Houston metropolitan area. The site also employs crawler robots in a myriad of maintenance activities to clean and inspect equipment, as well as fixed monitors to perform routine tasks including leak and gas detection augmenting the site’s daily monitoring rounds with additional insight.

As technology continues to accelerate innovation, we continue to see robots and drones work alongside humans in our facility as a nimble, agile and versatile colleague to improve worker safety.

In the world of digitalization, worker safety goes hand in hand with cyber security, where cyber threats can disrupt operations. Therefore, it is paramount to set up the right data architecture, privacy and security to establish sound data management policies and also protect intellectual property related to data captured through robotic programs.

Deer Park’s robotics programs presents an opportunity to collect high quality data consistently and in real-time, increasing the amount of data and information we process every day to ensure the safe and stable operations of the facility while helping to improve the quality of life for people living in neighboring communities.