Cokebusters Wins British Chamber of Commerce National Award for Digital Revolution!

Today Cokebusters is announced as the National Winner in the ‘Digital Revolution’ category of the British Chamber of Commerce Business Awards 2024!  This comes after the recent news that we won the ‘Digital Revolution’ category of the Regional Future Business of the Year Awards.  When we think back to our humble (and very analogue!) beginnings in 2005, this is a huge achievement for us and we’d like to thank West Cheshire & North Wales Chamber of Commerce for their continued support over the years.

When Cokebusters was established it specialised almost exclusively in the ‘decoking’ (or pigging) of refinery fired heaters.  There was and still is significant and growing demand for this service, which is critical in ensuring operational readiness and optimal thermal efficiency of the refining process.

Some years later we announced a totally new service offer as a complement to our trademark decoking.  We had imagined, designed, built and successfully patented a single-bodied intelligent pig.  This was revolutionary and meant that in a single “combined service” operation, Cokebusters could not only decoke process piping, but now scientifically verify its cleanliness and examine the pipe surfaces for any signs of corrosion.  The single bodied tool was a world first with superior navigation around the geometries of complex process systems.

In the last 10 years we have cleaned and intelligently inspected some 1000 fired heaters across South America, USA, UK, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and into Asia, with the ever evolving smart pig capturing up to 30,000 measurements per second!  The digital data is interpolated and converted into a navigable high resolution 3D heat map.

In line with the increasing decarbonisation trajectory, Cokebusters was challenged to design and build a miniaturised tool to inspect a solar steam plant in the Oman desert in 2022.  This 100km tubing array was deemed ‘uninspectable’ due to its ultra small diameter.  Some 12 months later the team delivered the solution on site.  The ability to package a mobile digital inspection technology into a device with a diameter of only 1.5” was extraordinary and the world’s smallest intelligent pig was heralded, contributing to the Energy Industries Council Award for Innovation, Company of the Year and most recently the King’s Award for Innovation.

In 2023 and with support from our Knowledge Transfer Project with the University of Strathclyde, we started developing our 5^th generation digital inspection technology.  The basic design principle remains rooted on the 2013 ideal, but makes use of the rapid advances in ultrasonic arrays, modern circuitry and latest software architecture.  Practically the tooling will offer another step change in the amount and quality of data that can be collected.  This will permit the operator to see much smaller defects with a higher degree of accuracy.  The logarithmic change in the volumes and competency of data is steering the company towards an advancement in data science and machine learning for which a further KTP has been established.

This year we embarked on a second KTP with the goal of revolutionising our tube inspection service through machine learning. At Cokebusters we have always been relentless in our search for innovative ways to improve our technology and solve our clients’ problems and so we’re excited to explore the ways in which we can harness the latest digital advances to do just that.

We look forward to meeting fellow award winners at the 2024 Chamber of Commerce Business Awards in London next month.