Jan De Nul and Samsung C&T consortium has secured a contract, regarded as the biggest cable installation contract in Jan De Nul’s history, to deliver an HVDC cable and convertors package for the $3.6 billion ADNOC-TAQA Lightning Project.

The package awarded to Jan De Nul and Samsung is said to be currently the first-of-its-kind HVDC submarine cable project in the Middle East and MENA region.

The contract, awarded by the joint venture of Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), Electricité de France (EDF) and Kyushu Electric Power Japan, has a value of $3 billion of which $725 million is reserved for Jan De Nul’s scope.

As disclosed, Jan De Nul will be in charge of the design, installation, burial and protection of two cable clusters.

The cable clusters will be almost 1,000 kilometres long connecting the islands of Al Ghallan and Das in the Arabian Gulf to the onshore converter stations at Al Mirfa and Shuweihat in Abu Dhabi.

The first cable cluster, connecting Das Island to shore, comprises three 400 kV subsea cables of 135 kilometres each. The second cluster, connecting Al Ghallan island to shore, concerns four 320 kV submarine cables of 125 kilometres each.

The commissioning of the project is scheduled for 2025.

“This electrification project is the biggest cable installation contract in the history of Jan De Nul”, said Wim Dhont, manager of Offshore cables at Jan De Nul.

“This project will entail many of Jan De Nul’s versatile expertise such as cable laying, dredging, jet-trenching, rock protection, landfall preparation, riser platform fabrication and offshore installation. With two of the world’s largest cable installation vessels in our fleet (the Isaac Newton and the Connector), we are well prepared for the future works in the DC and AC subsea cable markets”.

For this project, Swiss company Hitachi Energy will supply four converter stations, which convert AC power to DC for transmission in the subsea cable and then reconvert it to AC from DC for use in the offshore power systems.

To remind, two United Arab Emirates-controlled oil and gas giants revealed the strategic project to decarbonise offshore operations as part of their efforts to reach the net-zero goals by 2050.

As explained by Abu Dhabi National Energy Company (TAQA) and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the Lightning Project is expected to reduce the carbon footprint of ADNOC’s offshore operations by more than 30%, replacing existing offshore gas turbine generators with more sustainable power sources available on the Abu Dhabi onshore power network.