Orbital Sidekick Helps iPIPE Consortium With Pipeline Monitoring Project

Orbital Sidekick hyperspectral imagery. Photo: Orbital Sidekick

Orbital Sidekick (OSK) on Thursday revealed that the company received a 12-month contract to serve as a technology partner with the Intelligent Pipeline Integrity Program (iPIPE). With this award, OSK will provide daily monitoring of pipeline assets in the oil and gas industry. OSK is the first commercial company to deploy hyperspectral sensors in space, and is working on a constellation of hyperspectral satellites. In October, OSK received a $16 million contract from the U.S. Air Force.

iPIPE is a consortium focused on advancing technologies to prevent and detect pipeline leaks, with participating companies including Dakota Access Pipeline, DCP Midstream, Enbridge, Equinor, Goodnight Midstream, Hess, Marathon Petroleum, Oasis Midstream Partners, ONEOK, and TC Energy. The consortium is managed by the Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota.

For this partnership, OSK will conduct both satellite and aerial operations over the Bakken and Permian basins. By the conclusion of the iPIPE project in late 2021, OSK intends to offer a commercialized, scalable monitoring service to detect and enable prevention of leaks along pipeline rights of way.

“The iPIPE commitment to Orbital Sidekick is an affirmation that our asset monitoring solution addresses a very real and urgent market need,” OSK CEO and Co-Dounder Daniel Katz said. “For the first time, operators will be able to objectively assess the health of thousands of miles of pipeline as often as daily, anywhere in the world, for not much more than they currently pay for visual aerial patrol.”