DJI Matrice Drones Cut Teesside Inspections to 16 Min

Checking a 375-acre oil terminal used to mean eight hours on foot and behind the wheel. ConocoPhillips just ran a trial that did the same job in 16 minutes from the air, flying a DJI drone-in-a-box beyond visual line of sight at one of the U.K.’s larger crude terminals.

The trial finished without incident and completed only 61% of its scheduled flights. Both numbers matter, and here’s what the company actually tested.

What ConocoPhillips actually tested

The trial ran 90 days through the first quarter of 2025 at the Greatham Tank Farm, part of the Teesside Oil Terminal. This is heavy infrastructure. The site covers about 375 acres, and its floating-roof tanks stretch more than 300 feet (92 m) across and stand over 65 feet (20 m) tall, each holding roughly 600,000 barrels of crude piped in from the North Sea since the 1970s.

ConocoPhillips flew a DJI Dock 2 paired with a Matrice 3TD carrying both visual and thermal cameras, launching two automated flights a day. Each flight lasted about 16 minutes and captured around 250 optical and thermal images, all beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), meaning the aircraft flew past the point where a pilot could see it.

That clearance isn’t simple to get. The terminal sits next to a nuclear power station, so the team needed special permission to fly in restricted airspace, and it had to show the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority the operation was compliant. A pilot stayed on standby through every flight, ready to take manual control if the drone drifted off plan.

The numbers worth reading twice

ConocoPhillips ran the trial on purpose through the worst weather months, and the completion rate reflects it. The drone finished 61% of its scheduled inspection flights, with wind and weather grounding the rest. I’d rather see that figure than a sunny-day demo that proves nothing about a North Sea winter.

The payoff is the time. A tank inspection that took around eight hours by vehicle and on foot dropped to a 16-minute flight, and every test flight finished without incident. The company expects a move to the newer DJI Dock 3 to push completion above 80%, which would turn a promising trial into something a terminal could lean on all year.

Glen Ransom, the storage and terminal project coordinator who led the work, called it “a significant first step” toward fully autonomous operations. He sees one docked drone serving more than a single team, pointing to value across “inspection, security, and operations.”

The hardware in the box

The system ConocoPhillips trialed is DJI’s second-generation drone-in-a-box. The DJI Dock 2 is a weatherproof IP55 station that recharges the aircraft from 20% to 90% in about 32 minutes and runs from minus 13°F to 113°F (minus 25° to 45°C), the kind of range a Teesside winter demands.

The Matrice 3TD that flies out of it carries an IP54 rating, stays up as long as 50 minutes, and reaches as far as 27 miles (43 km) on a charge, pairing wide and tele cameras with the infrared sensor that did the thermal work here.

The planned jump to the DJI Dock 3 is the real tell. That station launches in 10 seconds, holds an IP56 rating, handles winds up to 27 mph (12 m/s), and operates from minus 22°F to 122°F (minus 30° to 50°C). Its Matrice 4D aircraft weighs about 4.1 lbs (1,850 g), flies up to 54 minutes, and stacks a Four Thirds wide-angle sensor with two 48-megapixel tele cameras, while the thermal 4TD variant adds a laser rangefinder. More wind tolerance and faster launches are exactly what move a 61% completion rate toward 80%.

The DJI question hanging over it

Here’s the part American readers will notice. ConocoPhillips is a U.S. oil major, and it ran this trial on DJI hardware, the same brand Washington keeps trying to push out of American skies on security grounds. At a working terminal in the U.K., that politics doesn’t apply, and the company reached for the gear that does the job best.

That tracks with what I keep saying about DJI. The hardware is the best in its class for the price, and the restrictions aimed at it in the U.S. are political, not technical. Serious operators, including a team mapping crude tanks beside a nuclear plant, still choose DJI because the drone-in-a-box ecosystem is mature and it works.

DroneXL’s Take

The headline number is the 16 minutes, but the number that matters is the 61%. ConocoPhillips earns credit for running this in bad weather and reporting a completion rate that isn’t flattering, because that’s the figure that tells you whether autonomous inspection survives contact with reality.

Industrial inspection is where drone-in-a-box stops being a demo and becomes infrastructure. A station that launches itself twice a day, shoots 250 calibrated images, and keeps a human on standby is the model the whole sector is converging on, and oil and gas has the budgets and the hazard exposure to push it hardest.

The catch is that a 90-day trial isn’t a permanent operation. Special airspace clearance near a nuclear site, CAA sign-off, and a standby pilot cost money, and they don’t renew on their own. If the Dock 3 really clears 80% completion across a full year, ConocoPhillips won’t be testing drones anymore. It’ll be running them, and the rest of the industry will be checking the math.

Photo credit: ConocoPhillips