Dave Turner Engineering Pty Ltd

APA Group Projects  

APA Group is Australia’s largest natural gas infrastructure business, owning and/or operating in excess of $12 billion of energy assets.

Location : Northern Territory of Australia

Dates      : 2002 to 2013

Dave engineered the RTU stations of the SCADA systems on the following natural gas pipelines.  These pipelines are used to supply natural gas to the power stations operated by PowerWater at Channel Island and Weddell near Darwin.

Pipelines

Upgrade of the Amadeus Basin to Darwin gas pipeline.

Dave was the Design Authority for the SCADA upgrade of the original Amadeus Gas Pipeline (AGP) transporting natural gas from the Santos wells at Mereenie and Palm Valley.  Leeds and Northrup (L&N) C25 RTUs using Conitel were successfully replaced by SCD5200 RTUs using DNP 3.0 over TCP/IP on a VSAT link.

Bonaparte Gas Pipeline

Engineering team Leader for the SCADA system on this new natural gas pipeline from the offshore Bonaparte gas field to the junction of the main Armadeus Basin to Darwin pipeline at Ban Ban Springs. Included 5 RTU stations, solar and 3 phase power supplies, T640 loop controllers, VSAT terminal stations, a microwave link and a security camera.  Interfaced to the Honeywell Experian Master Station by DNP 3.0 / TCP/IP / VSAT.  Integrated site equipment including flow computers via serial links and to Cathodic Protection units using physical I/O.

Perseverance under adverse conditions saw this project finished.

BGP

Gas Stations

Wickham Point Regulator Station

This is the inlet station on a short pipeline from the ConocoPhillips LNG plant at Wickham Point on Darwin harbour to the main pipe from the Amadeus basin to the Darwin power stations.  As Invensys's Principle Applications Engineer, designed and implemented a software solution to meet a demanding client specification including batch trans-shipment of gas.

Ban Ban Meter Station

Another project by Dave Turner Engineering.

This is a pressure reduction and metering station at the end of the Bonaparte pipe, where it joins the original Amadeus to Darwin pipe at Ban Ban Springs.  Major work was performed when Dave engineered the SCADA system while working for Invensys.  An odouriser plant was added in 2014 to give the odour-free natural gas the traditional gas smell.  The RTU configuration, code and documentation changes were performed by Dave, but now working for Dave Turner Engineering.

Weddell Power Station

This gas turbine power station near Darwin started operation in 2008.  It was built to supplement Darwin's electricity supply that was previously all from the nearby Channel Island power station.  Dave performed most of the commissioning and fine-tuning of the SCADA system while working for Invensys.

Darwin City Gate

While working at Invensys, Dave improved the valve control logic for this valve station.

Case Study

DNP 3.0 traffic analysis

Using the ASE-2000 protocol test set, operational DNP 3.0 traffic was acquired, then data analysed using a utility that Dave wrote in C, displaying the results in Excel.  This identified many rogue data points, which together were wasting over half of the limited VSAT bandwidth. 

 

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