SUMED PIPELINES PROJECT – EGYPT

Key Features:

Oil and Gas form a great concern to many nations, being the main attribute in a county’s economic growth and welfare. Driven by this realization, governments are continuously seeking new Oil sources.
New as well as current Oil fields demand the utilization of the latest communication techniques and technologies, in order to set up a secure and reliable two-way communication channel for monitoring, as well as handling reports that require massive amounts of data and transmission power.
Transmission Gas pipelines are designed to transport natural gas thousands of kilometers from the processing facility to different cities or countries. Since these pipelines extend for large distances they require the installation of remote systems to provide monitoring and protect them from theft and avoid gas leakage.

The Challenges

Provide remote monitoring to the installed gas leakage/theft detection system. This system was installed in seven different remote locations on a pipeline and it required a highly secure and reliable method of communication.

Solution requirements:

• Industrial grade devices providing reliable operation under extreme industrial environments
• High data rate network
• Secure accesses
• Network redundancy to prevent data loss in case the network goes down

The Solution

 

After several site visits, Xceltra provided Sumed with the M2M remote connectivity solution. This decision was made based on the following factors:

• The sites were scattered and had good mobile network coverage
• The path study carried showed that using wireless solutions will require huge investment in the hardware
• Using wired solutions was not an option
• Not preinstalled in the infrastructure which will require a huge installation cost

The designed M2M remote connectivity consisted of an OpenVpn set up using 3G Gateways for the following reason:
• Achieves the desired speed through a stable 3G connection
• Mobile operator independent static IP addressing with M2M Gateway
• Temperature ranges: –40 to +75 °C
• Hazardous location certification: Class 1 Division 2 to prevent explosion initiation
• Support for several encryption protocols for secure communication

Success Stories