Product theft and illegal tapping on pipelines is a major issue. According to the 2018 Concawe Report product theft is now the number one case for pipeline incidents. In total it accounts for 37% percent of all incidents on oil pipelines. This leads to high losses for the operators and impacts for the environment. The difficulty is to detect and localize theft that is done in very small amounts and for a limited and short time. This was not possible with classical leak detection methods.

This presentation describes methods to identify and localize illegal tapping and product theft by providing a theft detection system. It shows how internal leak detection technology and experience is used for identification with dedicated theft pattern recognition. To complete the overview results will be shown on real examples.