Drones Proving to be More than Just a Toy in Chevron Operations

Supermajor Chevron Corp. has brought out a new shiny toy in town—drones—for use in operations in the Permian Basin and Colorado.

The company began working with drone maker and operator Percepto in 2024 with a test near Midland. In early 2025, Chevron deployed a second Percepto system in Colorado. It showed its value right away in a demonstration flight, said Sam Jones, Percepto’s strategic account manager.

“All of a sudden you've got all these superintendents and operations people in the room going ‘Look at the levels in that separator,’” Jones said. "They're seeing things in a way that a human being going to the site with the naked eye just can't see.”

Now Chevron is evaluating more potential deployments. Chevron says the system has made work-hours more useful by reducing travel time and escalating higher-value tasks; increasing monitoring frequency at remote sites; and detecting production and delivery issues more quickly.

“With advanced technology, we can take a more proactive approach to managing our operations,” said Kerri Harvey, Chevron’s Midland Basin operations superintendent. “This enables us to make smarter decisions and remain aligned with our focus on producing energy responsibly.”

Jones said the system’s drones fly automated missions from Percepto’s network of 102 bases in Texas and three in Colorado, Jones said. The drones typically fly in a 2.5-mile radius from the bases.

Optical gas imaging cameras on the drones look for temperature differences at production sites, delivering that information to Chevron control rooms. The drones also carry regular visual cameras.

In those rooms, “they’re pulling our API constantly looking for new emissions, and that flags up on their production console,” Jones said. They receive alerts when anything is out of the ordinary.

Russell Robinson, Chevron’s deputy program manager for facilities and operations of the future, said aerial surveys of operations have been mostly through airplane flights.

“There’s still value to that, but as we start talking about a lot of assets over large square miles, the efficiency is only so much there,” he said in an interview with Hart Energy at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “Percepto and Chevron can fly autonomous missions from wherever they’re controlling that. It gives us the ability to scale our assets very quickly and to see a lot 24/7.”

The system does far more than detect leaks, Robinson said. It also helps identify potential equipment issues to improve reliability in the upstream and midstream sectors. The cameras can detect line blockages.

“How the equipment's moving liquid is huge,” he said. "They're able to see some of that type of indication and that can tell the operator …, ‘Hey, we're not working at optimal efficiency, or there's an issue that's about to occur.’”

When another demonstration flight in Midland detected a leak, an operator dispatched to the site couldn’t find it.

“He called back and said there's no leak,” Jones said. "We showed him the video. He went back up again, unpacked some of the packing around one of the valves and was like, wow, never would've found that. Can't smell it, can't hear it and could have got a lot worse.”

Ariel Avitan, Percepto’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, said Percepto’s FAA waiver allows Chevron and other partners to think about large-scale expansion.

“Now they have the ability to say, ‘OK, this is how I want to take this into the next step,’” he said. “We’re giving them the tools to allow that scalable capability.”