Comparative Review of Pipelines Monitoring and Leakage Detection Techniques

The oil and gas industry owns expensive and widely-spread assets. Any fault in this complex transportation network may result in accidents and/or huge losses thereby triggering various environmental and economic issues. Thus, real-time monitoring and preemptive measures based on fault propagation analysis limit some of these consequences. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the techniques used for monitoring and fault detection of oil pipelines. The pros and cons of the most common techniques are mentioned along with a review of the recently reported literature. It is anticipated that wider dissemination of the recent developments in pipelines monitoring and inspection will reform the oil sector from the perspectives of surveillance, security, inspection and emergency response.