The Dolphin Project is the plan to appraise, develop and produce hydrocarbons from two offshore platform complexes in the 'North Field' offshore Qatar. Hydrocarbons are to be transported via two 36" Sealines to an onshore processing plant at Ras Laffan. Processed sales gas from the plant is to be transported via a 48" Export Pipeline from Ras Laffan to a receiving plant at Taweelah in the UAE. 

To assist with understanding the oceanographic conditions, Saipem (who are responsible for the design and construction of the Sealines and Export Pipeline) contracted MSI to provide current measurement offshore Taweelah in approximately 20m water depth.

For these measurements MSI deployed a mooring fitted with an RD Instruments 300kHz acoustic doppler current profiler (ADCP) and Sonardyne LRT lightweight acoustic release transponder. The location of the ADCP is shown in the map (courtesy of Saipem).

All offshore operations were conducted from the vessel Jamuna 1, supplied by Saipem’s Dredging Sub-Contractor Van Oord. In addition to the deployment of the current measurement mooring, the MSI engineer assisted Van Oord with deployment of one of their own Datawell directional waveriders. See photograph below of all equipment laid out on the vessel prior to deployment.

Data were downloaded from the ADCP using RD Instruments WinSc software. The data were then imported into Matlab for further processing.

Various data products were provided to the client, including time series plots, joint distribution plots, current roses, histograms, progressive vector plots and tidal harmonics.

MSI has developed in house Matlab-based routines for processing oceanographic data. This allows us to provide almost any product required by the client.