Qatar tenders for offshore security 6, September 2010
Posted by thegulfblog.com in Qatar.Tags: Iran attack Qatar rigs, North Field protection, Qatar, Qatar national defence, Qatar national secuirty shield, Qatar NSS, Qatar security, Unmanned rigs attacked
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Qatar Petroleum (QP) is seeking tenders from engineering firms to construct security and surveillance towers to monitor and protect Qatar’s oil and gas fields.
Eight towers are to be built by 2013 with four covering the North Field, Al Shaheen and the Al Rayyan oil and gas fields while the others will cover the fields around Halul Island east of Doha.
MEED reports that this project falls under the auspices of the Qatar Defence Project. This, in turn, presumably incorporates Qatar’s National Security Shield (NSS) project. The NSS was an EADS led initiative to secure Qatar’s borders. They modeled their wares for the NSS at the Dimdex Defence earlier this year. It is a fully integrated, largely automated hub for real-time information gathered by towers dotted around Qatar. Once any kind of intrusion shows up on the screen-table, the controller can immediately launch the coastguard or Navy to intercept.
This system is clearly needed. Qatar’s oil and gas exports are core to its continued prosperity. Everything must be done to protect them as much as possible. Indeed, threats to these lifelines have moved from theory to reality relatively recently. The M-Star oil tanker that was attacked earlier this summer off the coast of the U.A.E. was on its way from Qatar to Japan. While – probably – Qatar and Japan were not ‘selected’ to be attacked, manifestly this does not matter.
Also there are reportedly frequent attacks on unmanned QP rigs by Iranians to either steal data, equipment or simply to machine-gun and destroy the platforms. Indeed, GSN describes this mini-confronation as having something of a ‘Wild West-cum-Cold War’ feel to it. In June 2004, for example, one Iranian was killed and another injured after they sailed too closely to an unmanned rig.
The Gulf blog 
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