At the 10th Annual Energy Drone & Robotics Summit (EDRS), a panel of senior asset owners from Chevron, Shell, Devon Energy, Imperial Oil, and Dow Chemical, led by Suzanne Lemieux, Director of Security and Emergency Management at the American Petroleum Institute (API), delivered their operational assessment of where the energy sector’s drone and robotics programs actually stand. In short, a decade of proof-of-concept work has yielded genuine operational value. Yet the ecosystem remains fractured by supply chain uncertainty, regulatory lag, data standards gaps and a workforce adoption curve that no algorithm has solved. Even so, predictions for what comes include next ulti-agent autonomous systems, edge AI and resident drone infrastructure. All of these issues will define whether the energy sector leads or follows in autonomous systems. Here’s the current score card.
From Inspection to Infrastructure: The Expanding Deployment Map
The energy sector’s drone and robotics use case portfolio has matured well beyond the aerial photography and routine visual inspection work that characterized early program. The EDRS panel outlined a deployment map organized around five operational verticals: operations support, maintenance and inspection, logistics, health and safety compliance and construction. Each requires distinct ROI logic and vendor ecosystems.
Confined Space Entry Elimination
This use case remains the clearest safety ROI driver. Dow Chemical’s 12-year-old program and Chevron’s enterprise-wide push toward zero confined space entry both demonstrate that collision-tolerant drone platforms, such as Flyability’s Elios 3, have come of age. Shell’s program now executes roughly 90% of its confined space work via collision-tolerant systems and has crossed from experimental to institutionalized. The Scout DI Gen 3, which integrates a cleaning head onto a confined space drone, exemplifies the convergence that reduces benzene and chemical exposure risk for workers who previously had no alternative to physical entry.
Drilling and Completions
This application represents Devon Energy’s fastest-growth deployment category. Pre-operation rig surveys deliver a critical cognitive load reduction benefit. By providing detailed aerial perspectives of how crackle setups and rig configurations are laid out before crews deploy into high-heat, high-pressure environments, drone data shifts decision-making from the field edge to a controlled analytical setting. The same principle applies to pipeline right-of-way management. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) explicitly validated embedded drone-based pipeline inspection authorization directly into its regulatory framework.
Drone-in-a-box (DIB) as Critical Infrastructure
This constitutes one the most significant strategic reframes on the deployment map. Shell’s offshore program has repositioned persistent DIB installations not as productivity tools but as “facility resilience infrastructure,” the equivalent of backup power or storm shutters. In the Gulf of Mexico, where hurricane evacuation and shutdown cycles can idle production for days or weeks, the ability to deploy resident drones immediately post-storm for damage assessment and recovery sequencing compresses the return-to-operations timeline in ways that dwarf any per-flight cost metric. Shell’s post-demo internal engagement, generated four or five distinct new use case proposals within hours and provides a well-documented adoption dynamic. Once operators see persistent drone infrastructure in action, demand generation becomes organic and rapid. For offshore and high-consequence onshore assets, the capital allocation argument for DIB then shifts from cost-per-flight to operational continuity, asset resilience, and energy security. That resonates at the executive and board level in ways that inspection savings rarely do.
Logistics and Material Movement
This represents the newest category where Imperial Oil is actively pushing boundaries. Nathan Warkentin, Imperial Oil Ltd., described ambitious near-term concepts: short-range material movement within active mine sites spanning up to 18 miles, offshore supply runs in the challenging sea states of Eastern Canada, and intra-facility logistics on large oil and gas footprints. These applications directly target the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and “windshield time” costs that Jared Markes, Devon Energy, identified as a hidden operational drag. Drone logistics, in this use case, is as much a workforce productivity and safety tool as a transportation solution.
Maintenance Robotics
This constitutes the most underserved, and therefore highest-opportunity, segment in the current market. Maintenance spend in energy operations runs three to five times inspection spend, yet the drone vendor market remains overwhelmingly inspection-dominated. Inspection ROI has been argued, piloted and in many cases institutionalized. Maintenance robotics ROI is still largely theoretical for most operators. Companies like Remotion (Norway), whose repair robotics platforms are beginning to localize for the U.S. market, signal where the next investment wave is forming. Early enterprise partnerships with maintenance robotics vendors, particularly those that address tank cleaning, structural repair and subsea maintenance, will position operators to capture disproportionate returns as the market matures, before the saturation dynamics that have compressed inspection ROI set in. For venture investors like Devon Energy’s internal VC function, this gap represents the clearest near-term deployment opportunity in the energy robotics landscape.
Measuring What Matters: The ROI Paradox
Despite the wide variety of robotic deploying, justifying it within capital-intensive energy enterprises has never translated into a clean return on investment (ROI) formula. EDRS’ most experienced operators confirmed that this ambiguity is, in part, structural and also not temporary.
Vasu Pillai said his team at Chevron reduced the problem to three operational vectors: “safer, cheaper, faster.” They track at-risk hours eliminated (confined space entry, work-at-height), cost deltas against conventional service providers and productivity efficiency gains. This three-axis dashboard has created executive-level visibility and built Chevron’s program momentum. Pillai admitted, however, that the framework continues to mature, particularly on the productivity dimension.
Shell’s Ross Doak introduced the paradox that haunts every unit-cost reduction argument. When robotic systems decrease the cost-per-inspection, operators inspect more assets. This, in turn, consumes the savings. For example, he shared, one Shell facility’s investment in advanced underwater inspection technology resulted in dramatically expanded coverage, equivalent total spend, but a vastly richer asset integrity dataset. These outcomes resist clean ROI attribution but represent undeniable operational value. “It’s very tricky to really nail down” (the key metric), Doak acknowledged. The better indicator is a directionally improving productivity trend.
From where he sits, Andy Lewis of Dow Chemical noted that the ROI conversation has bifurcated between safety-driven deployments, where the case is self-evident, and productivity-driven automation, where the business case must be constructed stakeholder by stakeholder.
Warkentin of Imperial Oil identified the vendor-versus-internal operator distinction as a critical variable. Vendor-delivered robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) allows upfront ROI metrics to be contractually scoped and validated in advance. Internal programs require a more nuanced accounting of employee time, training costs and indirect productivity gains. Neither model dominates. But both require deliberate governance frameworks before deployment.
Supply Chain Fracture and the DJI Dilemma
With clear ROI hanging in the balance, still even more hurdles remain for drone and robot programs in energy. High among them, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) effective licensing freeze on dominant foreign commercial drone platforms, including but additional to DJI, has forced every major energy operator to confront a painful reality. The platforms that have delivered proven safety and quality ROI have now become procurement liabilities.
Markes of Devon Energy described the tension. Operators that continue to rely on impacted drones face both reputational and political crossfire. At the same time, domestic alternatives cannot match the reliability threshold that industrial deployments demand. “Safety and reliability,” he noted, “because nobody’s going to use it if it’s not reliable, if it doesn’t work when they need it.”
The broader geopolitical reality complicates nationalism issues. Markes pointed to the pervasive integration of Chinese-manufactured components across the entire technology stack, from circuit boards to smartphones, as evidence that drone-specific restrictions represent a politically expedient response to a systemic supply chain challenge.
Pillai advanced a systems-level counter-strategy. Rather than fixating on any single hardware vendor, build the full operational architecture, from data workflows and AI integration to sensor stacks. That way, swapping the hardware layer becomes a logistics problem, not a mission-critical failure. Warkentin reinforced this view. He added end-to-end service providers that offer complete data workflow agreements provide increasingly viable alternatives to hardware-centric vendor relationships.
Doak offered a real world success story even in the face of these regulatory concerns. The Scout DI Gen 3 system, he said, achieved U.S. market clearance within six months of vendor engagement. He suggested the post-FCC review process, while imperfect, is functional. “I think before it was actually worse,” Doak observed, “because it was just speculation.” Operationally, he believes the clarity of a defined compliance pathway, however demanding, provides a preferable alternative to ambiguous prohibitions.
The Regulatory Crossroads: BVLOS, Part 108 and Counter-UAS
Regulation never keeps up with technology. Case in point, the panel’s regulatory discussion centered around Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, the pending FAA Part 108 rulemaking, and the emerging threat landscape addressed by FAA NPRM 2209, the proposed temporary flight restriction (TFR) framework over critical infrastructure. Warkentin flagged a substantive gap in both the U.S. and Canadian frameworks, where he thinks detect-and-avoid (DAA) standards remain insufficiently defined. In active BVLOS operations in Canada under Transport Canada (TC) oversight, radar-based DAA is constrained by weather and cloud cover, while ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) alone is not accepted as a sole means of DAA. The regulatory agencies have not yet provided operators with a clear, scalable DAA compliance pathway.
Piling onto this, Markes called for direct FAA engagement with upstream oil and gas operators, mirroring the model used when EPA rule-writers visited Devon’s emissions testing facility, to ensure that BVLOS rules reflect operational realities rather than theoretical compliance scenarios.
Doak, who has a global operations perch, assessed the FAA’s emerging technologies division as “really on it” regarding Part 108 BVLOS scaling, especially the shift from pilot-centric to operations-centric models which will enable one operator to manage multiple concurrent missions. The NPRM for Rule 2209, he assessed, will provide an additional deconfliction mechanism critical to this one-to-many operational paradigm.
The counter-UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) dimension on top of this adds a distinct national security layer. Lemieux, drawing on API’s engagement with LNG (liquefied natural gas) export facilities along the Gulf Coast, described a documented threat environment where armed or surveillance drones cross from Mexico and target energy infrastructure. The NPRM 2209 framework restricts airspace but, as Lemieux noted in formal comments submitted to the FAA, does not specify enforcement mechanisms.
For Canadian operators, Warkentin pointed toward Remote ID identification partnerships and Class F restricted airspace designations over critical facilities as near-term mitigations, even while acknowledging that their law enforcement lacks independent drone interdiction capability. Chevron confirmed their active evaluation of counter-UAS technology platforms as an enterprise risk management function, separate from the robotics deployment team.
Strategic Takeaways for the Ecosystem
A few lessons learned jumped out from this expert operations and asset owners panel, for others seeking to build enterprise drone and robotics programs. Here’s the distilled version:
Architect For Hardware Agnosticism Now
Build drone and robotics programs around the full data and workflow stack (AI integration, sensor pipelines, decision-support infrastructure) so that any single hardware vendor, including those subject to FCC or supply chain disruption, can be swapped without mission-critical disruption. Replicate Chevron’s systems approach model here.
Reframe ROI as a Multi-Vector Portfolio
Track at-risk hours eliminated, cost-per-task versus conventional baselines, and productivity trend direction, not just unit-cost reduction. Acknowledge that expanded inspection coverage may consume unit savings but that generating superior asset integrity data compounds long-term value.
Engage FAA and TC Proactively on BVLOS and DAA Standards
The regulatory gap on DAA is a deployment ceiling. Energy operators with active BVLOS programs must submit structured operational data and invite regulator site visits to shape Part 108 and TC frameworks before final rules ossify impractical compliance requirements.
Treat DIB as Critical infrastructure, Not Just a Productivity Tool
Shell’s hurricane resilience program views persistent drone infrastructure as a facility reliability investment. For offshore and high-consequence onshore assets, the ROI calculus shifts from cost-per-flight to operational continuity and rapid post-event recovery. This provides a far more defensible capital allocation argument.
Establish Counter-UAS Governance as an Enterprise Risk Function
The threat from criminal and adversarial drone operators against energy infrastructure is documented and escalating. Operators should not wait for FAA NPRM 2209 enforcement mechanisms to mature. Activate remote ID monitoring partnerships, restricted airspace petitions and internal counter-UAS evaluation programs should be in parallel.
Prioritize Maintenance Robotics over Inspection in the Next Investment Cycle
Maintenance spend is three to five times inspection spend in energy operations, yet the robotics market remains inspection-dominated. As companies like Norway’s Remotion localize to the U.S. market, and venture-backed platforms mature, early partnerships with maintenance robotics vendors will yield disproportionate operational returns relative to the current inspection-saturation investment pattern.
The Threshold Has Been Crossed
The energy sector’s drone and robotics programs have crossed a threshold…and there’s no going back. Tanks inspected without confined space entry. Rigs surveyed before boots hit the deck. Offshore facilities assessed within hours of a hurricane’s landfall. A decade of hard-won proof points have permanently altered the operational calculus for asset-intensive energy companies.
The EDRS panel telegraphed that the next competitive divide will not be drawn between companies that have drone programs and those that do not. It will be drawn between organizations that treat autonomous systems as infrastructure, embedded in workflows, governed by enterprise-grade data standards and defended against adversarial threats, and those still chasing per-unit ROI on a shrinking curve.
The regulatory environment is moving, the vendor ecosystem is maturing and the use case map is expanding faster than most compliance frameworks can follow. For energy operators willing to lead that convergence rather than react to it, the operational and strategic returns will compound well beyond anything the early inspection pilots suggested was possible. The future belongs to the bold…and the drones and robots in energy.