Two UK firms have been awarded the world’s biggest fiber distributed sensing project to protect and monitor the 1,850km TANAP pipeline project
OptaSense, a UK based worldwide leader in Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) and its partner Optilan, a giant company in the world of communications and security systems provision, were awarded the contract running into $30 million early this year. As of now, the project is now entering the phase of equipment delivery. This has since been described as a big milestone for the UK QinetiQ company.
The firms were awarded the combined security and leak detection project from ABB, a Swedish-Swiss international company, which is the main contractor for the delivery of the TANAP project tasked with engineering, procurement and construction.
The Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline project, commonly referred to as TANAP, will cost an estimated $10-11 billion. The project is geared towards making it possible to transport Azerbaijan’s Shah Denis field gas from Georgian-Turkish border to Turkey’s western borders.
The TANAP natural gas pipeline is expected to transport an initial capacity of around sixteen billion cubic meters of gas in a year. Turkey will get at least six billion cubic meters of the supplied gas while the remaining ten billion cubic meters will be transported to Europe. It is anticipated that this project will go a long way in making Turkey a regional energy hub.
OptaSense Executive Director Magnus McEwen-King said his firm is looking forward to working hand in hand with Optilan as well as ABB in helping TANAP to employ the latest OptaSense technology in making the project a big success while at the same time cutting on the cost of the asset ownership.
The TANAP pipeline’s construction was started in 2015 and it is expected to be complete by the year 2018.