A SAR-BASED FEASIBILITY STUDY ON DETECTION OF OIL SEEPAGE FROM BURIED PIPELINES

In the event of an accidental oil spillage from buried pipelines, the leakage may be detected fairly late, sometimes months after it started, with economic and environmental impacts that are difficult to recover. An early detection is desirable but difficult to achieve when the pipelines are buried, hidden by thick vegetation or in quite isolated areas. If the extent of buried pipelines network is also considered the problem may appear cumbersome. Satellites may support an early detection and, a feasibility study proving so, is described in this paper. A controlled spillage exercise has been organized in the UK and satellite data acquisitions tasked. Synthetic Aperture Radar datasets have been acquired over the site, before and after the controlled spillage, in three different tests with different quantities of red diesel spilled. The design of the whole exercise is described in the paper in addition to the SAR data processing. Preliminary results show that a significant change in the mean backscattering coefficient (a decrease of about 1 dB) is appreciated in X-band SAR data when the volume of oil, spilled or poured, reaches values in the order of 160 gallons.