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Oil & Gas Processing Facility — Industrial Scan to BIM

165 haSite area
2 years, phasedCapture period
Industrial Scan to BIMService

The situation

This site's scope was 165 hectares, and it never held still: capture ran intermittently over two years, alongside active construction, rather than as one visit to a finished plant. Given the sensitivity of the site, this case study is deliberately kept without a named client or location.

The approach

Access, not scale, was the real constraint. Elevated structural steel, zones running at process temperature, and a commissioning area tight enough on work permits and safety sign-off that every visit had to be scheduled around it — all captured with the same Total Station and FARO workflow we run on every industrial site. LOD landed at 300 across most of the facility and up to 400 wherever a specific unit needed finer detail, not one blanket spec applied everywhere.

The outcome

Two years in, the facility has an as-built record that grew alongside construction instead of describing it after the fact — coordination and maintenance planning now work against a model that's rarely more than a few months out of date.

Aerial registered point cloud of the full oil and gas processing facility, showing tank farms, process units, and jetty
Aerial registered point cloud of the full oil and gas processing facility, showing tank farms, process units, and jetty
Second aerial point cloud pass over the storage tank area, processed in DJI Terra ahead of registration
Second aerial point cloud pass over the storage tank area, processed in DJI Terra ahead of registration
Field crew capturing structural steel at height with a scissor lift and laser scanner
Field crew capturing structural steel at height with a scissor lift and laser scanner
Massing model of the tank farm and process area, coordinated against the registered point cloud
Massing model of the tank farm and process area, coordinated against the registered point cloud
Detailed facility model with piping runs and structural elements modeled from the scan data
Detailed facility model with piping runs and structural elements modeled from the scan data
Rendered visualization of the full facility model, tanks and process units in finished massing detail
Rendered visualization of the full facility model, tanks and process units in finished massing detail

Services used

Industrial Plant Scan to BIM →Scan to BIM →

Questions about this project

Why isn't this case study more specific about the client or location?
Oil and gas facilities are often subject to strict confidentiality and security requirements. We keep this one deliberately general rather than risk identifying the site.
Why did capture take place over two years instead of one site visit?
Construction was still active across the 165-hectare site, so capture was phased to track what was actually built rather than scanning a plant that was still changing underneath the model.
What made access the hardest part of this project?
Elevated structural steel, process-temperature zones, and a commissioning area with tight work-permit and safety sign-off requirements — each one meant scheduling around constraints rather than a straightforward walk-through capture.
Why does the LOD vary across the same facility instead of one consistent level?
Different units needed different levels of downstream detail — LOD 300 covered most of the site, with LOD 400 reserved for the specific areas that actually required it, per our Need-LOD approach.
Can this be done without publicly disclosing the details of our facility?
Yes — this case study is itself an example of that: full confidentiality, an NDA where required, and no client name or identifying detail published without written permission.

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