End User:

Saudi Aramco

Scope:

Design, supply, installation and commissioning of substation RTUs at four remote substations and establish communication with central power control center (Shaybah SCADA Connectivity Contract).

Background:

Saudi Aramco conducts drilling operations in Shaybah.

Shaybah is a reserve of 14 billion barrels of Arabian extra light crude and 25 trillion cubic feet of gas. The reserve is in the remote deserts of an empty quarter of the Kingdom.

There are four substations located near different plants. They are:

• GOSP1
• GOSP2
• GOSP3
• RIC (Containerized)

The aim of this setting up a Remote Substation Control System is to establish remote monitoring and control of these substations from Dhahran Power Control Centre (PCC), situated around 800 km away from the drilling locations.

System Description:

The four substations powering up drilling sites are very old and uses hardwired I/Os for Alarms and Mimic for majority electrical protection equipment except for some IEDs which uses IEC 61850 protocol through Fibre optic cables in GOSP2.

GE D20 IO system is used to acquire data from hard-wired protection relays. Existing transformer AVR Systems are integrated to the new RTU. MFMs are integrated via Modbus RTU and energy meters are integrated via SEAbus which is an obsolete protocol for energy meters from Siemens.

GE D400 Dual Redundant Data Concentrators along with local embedded SCADA is used for reception of all the above signals from each substation. All four data concentrators are communicated to main SCADA at power Control Centre through DNP 3.0 Protocol.