Italian cabling firm Prysmian has won a €60m ($62.5m) contract for laying submarine cables as part of the strategic HVDC transmission system for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Abu Dhabi National Energy Company PJSC (TAQA) Lightning Project in the UAE.
Prysmian secured a deal for the supply of power cables worth around €220m in January. The contract was awarded under a limited notice to proceed by Samsung C&T as part of its EPC consortium with Jan De Nul, with an option open for an installation agreement.
ADNOC and TAQA announced the successful financial closure of their $3.8bn project to power and significantly decarbonise ADNOC’s offshore production operations in September. The main purpose of the new HVDC link is to replace ADNOC’s current offshore power with a renewable onshore power source, reducing its environmental impact and CO2 emissions.
Under the ADNOC Lightning Project, Prysmian will design, supply, assemble and test a symmetrical monopole system consisting of four HVDC 320 kV single-core cables with XLPE insulation, along with fiber optic cable systems, that will connect the Al Mirfa onshore converter station to Al Ghallan, an artificial offshore island in the Arabian Gulf, located off the Abu Dhabi coast.
The project comprises both a subsea route of approximately 134 km of submarine HVDC cables, and onshore routes located at Al Mirfa and Al Ghallan Island, totalling approximately 3.5 km of HVDC land cable route. Offshore installation operations will be performed by Prysmian’s cable-laying vessel Leonardo da Vinci, with the shallow water activities being performed by cable-laying barge Ulisse. The commissioning of the project is scheduled for 2025.
