SCADA System For Potable Water Pipeline Jabal Mibrih Road

About this project

The potable water transmission pipeline along Jabal Mibrih Road needed supervisory control across its full length. Almafor delivered the SCADA system together with the communications route it runs on, as a specialist subcontractor.

The headline figure is 17 kilometres of fibre optic cable, supplied, laid and terminated along the route. The cable itself is the smallest part of that number. What 17 kilometres means in practice is route survey, trenching and ducting through ground that already contains other services, chambers at pulling and jointing positions, splicing, termination into patch panels at each end, and reinstatement of everything opened up.

Fibre was the right medium because of what the client expects from the asset. Radio and cellular are cheaper to install and hand over a dependency on somebody else's network, somebody else's coverage and somebody else's decision about when to retire a generation of equipment. On a pipeline expected to run for decades, owning the path removes an entire category of future argument about why the data stopped arriving.

The SCADA scope covered design, engineering, configuration, testing and commissioning, so the supervisory layer and the network beneath it sat in one contract. When those are split between suppliers, every intermittent fault turns into a meeting rather than a fix.