Background

Karachaganak Atyrau Transportation System (KATS) is the main export route for stabilized liquid hydrocarbons produced at the Karachaganak Field and these pipelines have been in operation since 2003. The transportation system consists of a 24 inch buried pipeline from the Karachaganak Processing Complex (KPC) to Atyrau on the Caspian Sea. There are two pumping stations; one at Bolshoi Chagan and one at KPC and a receiving and storage facility in Atyrau. KPO operates and maintains all of these facilities. In Atyrau, the line connects to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) system which transports oil to Novorossiysk where it is loaded on tankers and exported.

AVENCOM Responsibility

SDH STM-1 (0.156 Gbit/s) was the only system that used in KPO Export Pipeline Aksai – Bolshoi Chagan Pumping Station (BCPS) – Atyrau Terminal. It was used mainly for DCS purposes by SCADA system.

As new demands for data and voice access emerged in rapidly developing sites such as Aksai, Uralsk and Atyrau it became clear that the capacity of the existing linkshould be tremendously increased. Moreover DCS team required to increase resilience of the existing data transmission facilities by providing a high capacity backup system that is less susceptible to failures than infrastructure previously deployed. Another requirement was to design a system with minimum number of repeaters along the route.

AVENCOM Approach

Within 15 years, AVENCOM has been running a projects program to incrementally increase the export pipeline’s data link capacity. This approach ensures that all current link capacity requirements are met, while at the same time economically reasonable upgrades are carried out for future needs on an incremental basis.

Currently, VOLGA DWDM equipment is installed at Aksai, Bolshoi Chagan, BVS-26 pumping station and Atyrau Terminal. The throughput capacity of the system is two STM-4 channels (2×0.625Gbit/s=1.25 Gbit/s) and two Gigabit Ethernet channels. Between Aksai and Bolshoi Chagan Pumping Station (BCPS) the throughput is increased to four STM-4 links and four Gigabit Ethernet links. The distances of links are: Aksai-BCPS 180 km, BCPS-BVS26 230 km, BVS26-Atyrau 230 km.

Four customer engineers were trained to maintain the equipment.

Summary

The system has been operating successfully for more than 15 years.