Behind the Remote Operations Center — How Imperial Oil Flies Drones From 300 Kilometers Away

Pilots in Calgary, drones in Cold Lake

The operators flying Imperial Oil's drones at Cold Lake aren't at Cold Lake. They're in Calgary, roughly 300 kilometers south, sitting in a dedicated remote operations center built in partnership with Canadian UAVs.

"We have four operations in Cold Lake. Those are being flown out of Calgary," said Nathan Workington, Imperial's UAS subject matter expert, in a recent ROAR West conversation with Remote Robotic. (watch at 16:14) "I think it's maybe one of the first of its kind in Canada to have four different drones being simultaneously flown across an asset" remotely. The setup works because Canadian UAVs supplies both the operations center and the radar system that gives Imperial the detect-and-avoid capability required to legally fly beyond visual line of sight — without that radar, an operator with every other qualification in place still isn't allowed to fly BVLOS at all.

Covering the hours nobody is on site

The case for building a remote operations center in the first place comes down to a scheduling problem every industrial site has. "Everyone goes home at 5:00 or whatever, right? So then you only have a few night operators, and night operations are always the lowest staffed points," Workington said. A centralized team in Calgary, watching multiple sites through drone feeds, can cover exactly the hours when on-site staffing is thinnest — without needing to put more people on a plant floor overnight.

What it caught in six months

What that coverage actually caught surprised even the team that built it. "Within the first six months of operating drones with due surveillance, with remote operation... we were already finding things that were happening kind of after everyone went home, and able to send the night operations folks there to intervene on those activities, which immediately brought value to the whole system." (watch at 17:00) In other words: the business case was built around covering a staffing gap, and the system started paying for itself by catching real incidents nobody would otherwise have known about until the next shift walked in.

Repurpose the workforce, not replace it

Running operations remotely also changes what the on-site workforce spends its time doing. Instead of people driving around a plant on routine visual checks, that surveillance work shifts to the remote team and frees site staff for "value added work" — maintenance, lockouts, the hands-on tasks that actually require being physically present. Workington was clear that this isn't about headcount reduction: "My standpoint has always been to repurpose the workforce, not replace the workforce." (watch at 37:25)

The software and security side

The remote operations model does carry its own technical and security questions, particularly around live video. Imperial currently streams from its drone controllers through Zoom rather than a dedicated platform, specifically to avoid logging separate credentials into third-party software — a workaround born from internal IT security review, not an ideal long-term architecture. (watch at 44:32) It's a useful reminder for any organization building a remote operations center: the hardware and the radar tend to get the attention, but the software, security review, and data path back to the people watching the screen are just as much a part of the build.

Making it ordinary

Imperial's vision for where this goes is to scale that one Calgary room to every site it operates — anyone in the company able to pull up a live feed from any dock, at any time, from wherever they happen to be. The Cold Lake setup is the proof that the model works. The next phase is making it ordinary.

Learn how our Remote Operations Center (ROC) program delivers remote, always-on coverage, or contact our team.