Building Marine Infrastructure for Science

Abstract

The NEPTUNE Canada cabled ocean observatory is a Canadian funded undersea utility whose sole purpose is to support research into the ocean depths. With 800 km of subsea cable, and five science sites with 10 kW power and 4 Gb/sec data transmission at each, it will represent the first of a new generation of cabled subsea observatories. In many ways NEPTUNE Canada matches the utilities all of us use every day in that it supplies electricity and "telephone lines" to customers' places of business. Both terrestrial and subsea utilities require major effort by specialised manufacturers and installers to build the infrastructure, and a knowledgeable management and engineering team to create specific requirements, protect the owner's interests during construction and manage the manufacturers and installers. However the management of the development and construction of undersea utilities for science differs significantly from the development and construction of more conventional utilities such as electrical grids and telephone networks. First and foremost, working in the marine environment versus on land changes the risk profile entirely. Whereas a failed piece of equipment in a terrestrial network may require two technicians and a cube van to drive out to a remote site, failures subsea will require months of planning, mobilization of ROVs and ships, as well as significant expenditures of money, effort and customer goodwill. Therefore for an undersea system to be economical and successful through its working life, a significant portion of the funding has to be spent on ensuring long term reliability of the subsea plant prior to installation. Secondly, NEPTUNE Canada is a utility dedicated to scientific use. The design of NEPTUNE Canada is driven jointly by the needs of scientists, funding issues and limits, and assessment of the current capabilities of the technologies. Terrestrial utility design is driven by commercial or regulatory requirements, which can usually be defined and fixed early in the project, so that requirements and specifications can be set prior to contract award. However some of the NEPTUNE Canada requirements have been deliberately kept flexible well into the development cycle, to allow accommodation of the scientists needs as those needs develop. This flexibility adds significantly to the challenge of risk identification and management. Thirdly, at the start of the NEPTUNE Canada project, no technology existed that could meet the scientist's requirements. Whereas terrestrial utilities tend to be a further step along a continuum of development, NEPTUNE Canada stepped boldly into an untried area. Managing this development risk with a capped budget would not have been possible without the support of the NEPTUNE Canada prime contractor, Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), a division of Alcatel-Lucent. The experience ASN brought from the submarine cable industry, plus its unmatched research and development engineering capabilities, have enabled NEPTUNE Canada to pursue the scientists' initial concept of high power and high bandwidth communications delivery to and from the deep ocean. This paper will use the experiences gained so far in the funding, development, manufacture and installation of the world's first multipurpose deepwater cabled ocean observatory to consider how useful the models of terrestrial power and communications utilities are when planning scientific utilities and infrastructure such as NEPTUNE Canada. It will discuss the challenges of managing the sometimes disparate interests and expectations of the groups and institutions involved. And it will identify some of the pitfalls that need to be avoided by anyone trying to build these types of infrastructure.