Robotics
Mr. Fix-It: A Spraying, Snaking Robot Aims to Patch America’s Crumbling Pipelines
Six to ten feet below the ground, 12-inch pipes carry natural gas all over America. They wind around electrical conduits and water mains. They bear the weight of daily commutes, delivery trucks, and city buses. And a lot of them are leaking. “Some of these pipes have been in the ground for over 100 years, and they’re only getting older,” says Alexander Duncan, a roboticist at GE Research. “Nobody really thought through how to service them. So it’s now a massive and costly problem for the national infrastructure.”
When Shale Gas Met Software: The Industrial Internet Will Monitor a Vast Pipeline Network
Getting shale gas out of the ground is one thing. But taking it to customers is quite another.
American pipeline operators are investing as much as $40 billion every year to maintain, modernize and expand their networks. The shale gas boom is putting operators under pressure to move more gas to market faster and more safely, and many U.S. pipelines have been in service for at least two decades.