A Fundamental Approach to Oil and Gas Leaks Detection

Leak detection is a very important step in the production and maintenance of oil and gas pipelines. It is needed to check tightness specifications and to ensure other installation specifications are fulfilled. In this paper some pipeline leak detection methodologies are studied to come up with a design structure that could ease pipeline leak detection and monitoring via Google earth. A common difficulty identified for most of these methods is the aspect of generating a leak alarm when the pipeline is under normal operation, such irregularities found in most methodologies reduce the confidence operators have in a system because in most cases a real leak may be overlooked. The design direction of this work is a proposed methodology for effective real time leak detection and monitoring of oil and gas pipelines.