Oil and gas infrastructure often appears stable on the surface. But beneath your tanks and buried pipelines, subtle external threats may be developing long before any internal failure indicators appear.
While traditional inspections focus on structural integrity and internal pipe conditions, many of the industry’s most costly failures are driven by environmental and ground conditions surrounding the asset itself — subsidence, slope instability, soil shifts, or vegetation changes that quietly escalate until they trigger catastrophic events.
Rezatec delivers two complementary monitoring solutions that help oil and gas operators detect these external risks early — and prevent failures before they happen.
Two Monitoring Solutions, One Complete View of External Risk
Ground Movement Monitoring for Oil & Gas Tank Foundations
For tank farms, refineries, and fixed oil and gas facilities, ground instability can compromise foundation health long before visible signs like settlement or cracking appear. Rezatec’s InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) technology detects millimeter-scale ground movement beneath storage tanks and foundations, identifying subsidence, uplift, or lateral shifts that threaten structural stability.
By providing continuous, remote updates every 6–12 days, InSAR allows asset integrity teams to track terrain changes over time — enabling early intervention before costly repairs or unplanned downtime occur.
Geospatial Risk Modeling for Buried Pipelines
For buried pipelines, environmental conditions such as slope movement, soil properties, and external ground instability are among the leading drivers of failure risk. Rezatec’s geospatial risk modeling combines:
- Pipeline attributes (material, diameter, coating, age)
- Slope and terrain data
- Soil composition and moisture levels
- Vegetation stress (via multispectral data imaging)
- Ground movement anomalies that may signal early-stage leaks
Using your historic failure data, Rezatec’s solution processes these environmental variables and uses a machine learning model to identify where pipelines are most likely to fail due to external forces — well before internal pressure changes or inline inspections detect issues. In many cases, vegetation stress or subtle surface changes provide the earliest indicators of developing leaks or environmental instability.
Our platform detects these early patterns, identifies high-risk segments, and enables targeted inspections or maintenance before any surface issue appears. And it does all this passively—no sensors, no site visits required.
Why External Monitoring Matters
Failures rarely occur overnight. Most environmental threats build gradually:
- Ground uplift from groundwater recharge or soil swelling
- Slope instability introducing pipe strain over time
- Soil settlement compromising tank foundations
- Vegetation stress patterns revealing possible small leaks
- Industrial activity altering external ground loads
Without real-time environmental monitoring, these early-stage threats go unnoticed — until a rupture, collapse, or major loss event occurs.
Two tragic historical examples underscore the point:
- Santa Barbara Oil Spill (2015): A corroded pipeline released 140,000 gallons of crude oil after years of external terrain stress, corrosion, and missed early warnings.1
- Guadalajara Explosion (1992): A leaking buried fuel pipeline aggravated by ground movement led to an explosion that killed over 200 people. Subsurface shifts and poor external detection contributed to the disaster.2
Both incidents could have been mitigated if external environmental warning signs had been visible and acted upon earlier.
A Proactive Approach to Oil & Gas Asset Integrity
Rezatec helps operators move from reactive inspections to proactive prevention — by closing the external monitoring gap that traditional inspections often miss:
- Tank Monitoring: Millimeter-scale ground movement detection beneath storage tanks and process facilities.
- Pipeline Monitoring: Predictive external failure modeling using geospatial intelligence and machine learning.
All fully remote. No sensors. No site visits. Continuous, scalable insights directly from satellite data.
Smarter Integrity Management Starts Beneath the Surface
By integrating InSAR ground monitoring and geospatial pipeline risk modeling, Rezatec helps oil & gas operators:
- Detect external threats long before internal damage occurs.
- Prioritize field inspections and repairs based on real-world risk.
- Reduce unplanned downtime, costly remediation, and safety violations.
- Protect infrastructure investments for the long term.
In a world where what happens beneath your assets often dictates what happens above them, Rezatec gives you the foresight to act early — before the ground shifts.
1: Los Angeles Times. “Violence Erupts After Verdict: 4 Officers Acquitted in King Beating.” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1992. Guadalajara Gas Blasts Kill 162 : Mexico: A daylong series of explosions thunders under the city, leveling houses and ripping open streets. More than 800 are injured. The cause is disputed.
2: The Guardian. “Oil Spill from Broken Pipeline Stretches Four Miles along California Coast.” The Guardian, May 20, 2015. Oil spill from broken pipeline stretches four miles along California coast.