Diagnosis and Cure: Radioisotope Applications in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry

Radioactive isotopes were first applied to investigate industrial problems some sixty years ago and since then, there has been a continuous expansion in their usage. The oil industry, in particular, was quick to recognise the potential usefulness of this technology and one of the earliest industrial studies in the literature is concerned with the use of radioactive material to tag the cement of oil-well casings [1]. Today, radioisotope technology is in routine use throughout the international oil/gas industry for troubleshooting and process optimisation on large-scale industrial process plants. By analogy with the use of radioisotopes in medical diagnosis, these applications have come to be known as “process diagnostics”