Energy storage & tanks
with the details that matter.
BESS sites, tanks, silos, stacks, and utility campuses. We pair the capture method to the way your team will use the result.
What needs to be
measured first?
Tanks, silos, and BESS installations need both the asset and the ground around it. Aerial capture handles the yard and tank tops; terrestrial scanning handles the equipment rooms and pipe.
Every facility has a different risk surface. We start with access, geometry density, and the decision the capture needs to unlock — then choose between laser scanning, drone mapping, or both.
Talk through a scope- BESS sites
- Tank farms
- Silos
- Stacks
- Pipe racks
- Yards
Measuring tanks, silos, and storage sites
Storage assets are captured from two directions at once, because the parts that matter most are the ones nobody should be standing on. The order below alternates between ground and air, and it starts with the shell, since almost every downstream question refers back to it.
Shell from a ring of ground stations
Setups spaced around the full circumference, close enough that every course is seen at a workable incidence angle. This is what produces verticality, out-of-roundness, and course-by-course profile data — and it is why one or two setups on the accessible side are not a tank survey.
Roof and appurtenances from the air
Roof plate, rafters where visible, vents, gauge hatches, mixers, and any deformation across the deck, captured from a planned flight rather than by sending a person onto plate whose condition is the actual question.
Nozzles, manways, and connections
Position, projection, elevation, and orientation of every connection that a line ties into, plus the flange faces themselves. This is the geometry piping fabrication depends on and the geometry that legacy drawings are most reliably wrong about.
Bund, foundation, and containment
Dike walls, containment floor, sumps, ringwall and chime elevation around the base, and the drainage falls inside the bund. Containment volume calculations and any settlement discussion both start here.
Site equipment and BESS enclosures
Pump rows, valve stations, manifolds, loading racks, and on storage sites the battery enclosures, e-houses, transformer pads, and the spacing between them that fire and separation requirements govern.
Bunds, permits, and flying over a terminal
Tank sites are permit environments. Entering a bund, working near a loading rack, and bringing any equipment inside a classified boundary all run through your permit system, and gas testing and escort requirements are normal rather than exceptional. The practical consequence is that the walk-down and the permit conversation happen before a date is fixed, not on the morning of the capture.
The aerial half needs its own planning. Flights over a terminal or a storage yard are shaped by airspace authorization, site security rules, wind at height, and the operator's need to keep the aircraft in sight, and the site may impose its own standoff distances around vents and vapour sources regardless of what the airspace allows. Fixed-roof and floating-roof tanks also behave differently: on a floating-roof tank, what a flight can see of the roof depends on the liquid level on that day, so the fill state at the time of capture belongs in the record.
More on how this works in practice is on our guide to scanning without a shutdown.
What the data supports, and what it does not
A tank capture feeds several different specialists, and it is worth being clear that the scan supplies geometry to their process rather than replacing it. Inspection findings, fitness-for-service conclusions, and repair recommendations stay with your inspector or engineer.
| The decision | What to ask for | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement or out-of-roundness evaluation | Registered cloud plus shell profile and elevation data | The geometry feeds an evaluation your tank inspector performs; we supply the measurements, not the verdict. |
| New or replacement connecting piping | Cloud with modeled nozzles and tie-in geometry | Spool fabrication needs flange face position and orientation, which is precisely what drawings get wrong. |
| Containment and site civil work | Aerial surface model, contours, and volumes | Bund capacity, drainage falls, and regrading are site-scale questions answered from the air. |
| BESS or storage site expansion | Point cloud plus site orthomosaic and as-built plan | Enclosure spacing, access lanes, and interconnection routing all need current ground rather than a design set. |
Formats and what each one is good for are covered on the deliverables page.
Common mistakes on storage assets
- Too few stations around the shell — A tank captured from three positions has grazing incidence over most of its surface and blind sectors behind ladders and stairs. Circumferential geometry is only as good as the weakest sector, and that sector will be the one someone asks about.
- Cladding measured as shell — On an insulated or clad tank, the scanner records the jacket. Any diameter, thickness, or profile conclusion drawn from that surface is describing the insulation, and the model has to state which surface it represents.
- Ignoring the fill state — Liquid level changes what is visible and, on floating-roof tanks, where the roof physically sits. A capture with no record of the level at the time is much harder to compare against a later one, which undermines the whole point of a baseline.
- No tie between tank and site — Tank geometry registered only to itself cannot be used to route the pipe connecting it to anything else. Tying every tank into one site control network is what makes the dataset useful for the piping and civil work that follows.
Questions from terminal and asset teams
Can you scan a tank in service?
The exterior, yes — shell, nozzles, foundation, and bund are all captured with the tank in service, which is the usual arrangement. Interiors are a different job: they need the tank out of service, cleaned, gas-freed, and entered under your confined space procedure, so internal capture is scheduled into a planned inspection outage rather than added to an exterior visit.
Does this replace an API 653 inspection?
No. An inspection is performed by a qualified inspector and involves far more than geometry — thickness, condition, and judgement about fitness for service. What a scan does is supply dense, repeatable measurements of shell profile, verticality, and foundation elevation for that inspector to evaluate, which is a much better input than a handful of manual readings.
Can you get the tank roof without anyone walking it?
That is one of the strongest reasons to fly rather than climb. An aerial capture gives roof plate geometry, deformation across the deck, and the position of vents and fittings from a planned standoff, subject to airspace authorization, wind at height, and whatever separation distances the site imposes around vapour sources.
We are adding a BESS installation next to existing tanks. Useful?
Very. Enclosure spacing, fire access lanes, interconnection routing, and grading are all decided against the site as it stands today, which on a working terminal is rarely what the site plan on file shows. A combined aerial and terrestrial capture gives the civil and electrical designers one current base to work from.
Pair TLS interiors with drone exteriors for one coordinate story.
Roof, yard, tanks, structures, and the building envelope can live in the same project handoff when the control is planned upfront.
See existing conditionsMake the invisible
measurable.
Tell us what is inside, outside, and on the line. We will help you scope the capture and the handoff — in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut.
Request a scan quote