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Dubai, UAE
, - June 26, 2009:
Well known developer, manufacturer and installer of fibre-optic intrusion detection systems, Future Fibre Technologies (FFT) has opened a new office in Dubai to service and support the company’s growing activity across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions.
The Middle East’s high proportion of critical infrastructure, its political instability and increasing global energy prices combine to present special challenges to the suppliers and operators responsible for protecting the critical oil and gas infrastructures in the region. The opening of the new office, strategically located within the technology centre of Dubai Internet City, signals FFT’s commitment to increasing awareness and knowledge of fibre optic based security solutions in the region.
FFT is no stranger to the Middle East. The company has been active in many projects in the region in recent years including the highly successful deployment of perimeter intrusion detection systems for several seaports and for a large number of LNG and petrochemical plants.
FFT’s new office, which will house a full demo suite for Technical Training & Product Demonstrations along with local sales and technical support staff, will be managed by Adam Wilding-Webb, FFT’s newly appointed MENA Regional Manager.
Mr. Wilding-Webb, who has worked with security products and systems for many years in Dubai, is familiar with the special challenges facing those responsible for security in the region and his expertise in the two key areas – the plant and equipment (oil refineries, LNG plants, etc.), and the products’ transportation (pipelines) -- will assist the company’s new and existing customers identify the best solution available.
Mr. Wilding-Webb says that, regardless of the application or solution selected, the most important item by far in any security plan is to actually have a plan, and secondly, to have a procedure in place for responding to an intrusion.
Plant and equipment protection
For refineries, LNG and petrochemical plants, the main security threats come from intruders and deliberate sabotage. Often, the first line of defence at these facilities is a perimeter fence which, while succeeding to delay or deter intruders, is largely ineffective in protecting the entire perimeter. Obviously, a 6 to 10 km perimeter fence can easily be climbed or lifted in a number of places to allow completely undetected access to a site.
In the past, CCTV cameras employing Video Motion Detection (VMD) technology held great promise, but experience has shown that they have been prone to nuisance alarms, thereby reducing their effectiveness over time.
Similarly, traditional fence mounted intrusion detection sensors have proved less than ideal solutions, as they require power and electronics to be deployed every few hundred metres along the fence line, which is expensive to provide and intrinsically unsafe. In addition, their extremely basic processing power meant they typically traded off detection sensitivity to reduce nuisance alarms, ultimately undermining the very security these systems were originally intended to provide.
According to Adam Wilding-Webb, Future Fibre Technologies’ current generation of fibre optic based fence mounted intrusion detection technologies have overcome these problems to deliver a state of the art security system which is being used to protect an increasing number of the world’s refineries, LNG and petrochemical plants, as well as military bases, sensitive government facilities and other critical infrastructures.
The FFT product range, which includes Secure Fence and Secure Zone, uses its advanced Digital Signal Processing technology to overcome the problems of nuisance alarms.
“The technology uses signature recognition and advanced learning algorithms to “know” the difference between a branch blowing against a fence in a storm and an attempted intrusion,” says Wilding-Webb.
“The fact that our systems do not require any power or electronics to be installed on the fence line at all make them ideally suited to the Oil and Gas industry,” he said.
For oil and gas companies wanting the ultimate plant protection solution, Future Fibre Technologies recommends a fence mounted fibre optic detection system, linking back to the main security centre and ideally interfacing to CCTV cameras to provide visual confirmation to security staff so they can determine the exact nature of the intrusion or threat that they face.
It’s this type of configuration that the company has already installed on the perimeter fences at six critical LNG plants in the GCC in the last 12 months.
Both products have the added advantage of being available in an Arabic version, which delivers an intuitive and easy to understand graphical alarm interface to security staff in their local language and works with the company’s patented Alarm Recognition and Discrimination (ARaD) technology.
“The other advantage of Secure Fence and Secure Zone is their ability to pinpoint the location of intrusions to better than 25 metres anywhere along the entire perimeter fence,” Wilding-Webb says. “It’s this level of accuracy that clients demand today.
“The traditional 200 or 400 metre zones are simply not good enough anymore,” he said.
Pipeline protection
Like plants and equipment, pipelines must be protected to prevent theft, sabotage or third party interference (TPI) and once again, traditional protection methods have delivered extremely inconsistent results.
Regular pipeline patrols, periodic flyovers by aircraft and/or satellite imagery are prohibitively expensive and rely on being in just the right place at just the right time, resulting in a very low probability of detection and virtually no early warning.
Future Fibre Technologies’ state of the art advanced fibre optic based pipeline protection system, Secure Pipe, can detect and pinpoint the location of digging activities near pipelines – in real time, before the pipeline is damaged.
Adam Wilding-Webb, from FFT, says Secure Pipe comes at a much lower cost than alternative methods and can often use existing fibre optic cables as the sensor to reduce costs even further, provides valuable early warning of an event before pipeline damage or loss occurs. It monitors entire pipelines for interference in real time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can protect pipelines thousands of kilometres long.
“The Secure Pipe system has been successfully deployed on many oil and gas pipelines around the world, protecting thousands of kilometers since its launch in 2002. In one recent 50 km installation in Turkey’s Osmaniye region, Secure Pipe has prevented the theft of oil from no less than 13 illegal oil tap sites identified in an 18 month period between January 06 and July 07 before the installation.
The latest application has been for protecting high pressure gas pipelines in Europe to meet the new EU safety requirements,” Wilding Webb says.
There’s no doubt that the latest generation of detection products are far more advanced than their predecessors, resulting in quicker, cheaper and smarter protection of assets and infrastructures.
See for yourself why FFT is the ultimate force in fibre optic intrusion detection and location systems. Visit http://www.fft-mena.com or contact Adam Wilding-Webb on tel: +971 4 434 5357.
For more information, contact:
Michele Eckersley
Tel: +61 3 9819 2566
Mobile +61 422 726 344
Email: michele.eckersley@connectingimages.com.au
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