Design and construction of a scaled down supervisory, control and data acquisition (SCADA) system tailored for fuel handling at Jinja storage terminal.

Abstract

As a country that imports close to 100% of all the oil and petroleum products used, Uganda is constantly at a high risk of petroleum and fuel price shocks. To hedge against such situations, the government through Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) runs a 30 million liter capacity Jinja storage terminal (JST) that holds the country’s petroleum reserves. JST currently stores two types of fuel product: Automotive gas oil (AGO), Premium Motor Spirit (PMS). Activities being carried out at Jinja storage terminal include: offloading fuel into the storage terminal, loading fuel to buyers’ tankers and storing fuel. Currently, these activities being carried out at JST starting from field activities such as operating valves, taking records of fuel levels to management and planning are mostly being carried out using manual means and rudimentary methods with little inclusion of modern technologies such as automation, computerized data acquisition and data logging and networking. The way operations are carried out at JST is prone to human error, safety risks, is less efficient in utilization of resources especially human resources and is hectic for workers. In an effort to provide a solution, we are designing and constructing a network based Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system tailored for Jinja storage terminal that will be tested on a scaled down model of the Jinja storage terminal. The purpose of the project is to study the feasibility and requirements of implementing such a system on the actual Jinja storage terminal. The SCADA system offers tools for monitoring equipment in real time, accurate processing of data in real time, easier identification of errors and has a potential to improve enterprise resource planning (ERP) and management of the Jinja storage terminal.