Hibernia Express, Canada-UK

Scope of Work

OceanIQ^® worked closely with Hibernia Atlantic to develop the initial concept into a well engineered route. This was challenging as many widely accepted industry norms had to be torn up and fresh thinking used to achieve the goal. Great circle routing was the key – the shortest distance over a sphere is along a great circle. This is not easily appreciated over short distances but makes a large difference over several thousand kilometres. The difficulty is that great circle routing places the path of the cable over the Nova Scotian continental shelf and the Grand Banks, both places which are productive fishing grounds and which previous fibre optic route designers had avoided.

Working closely with local stakeholders and Canadian authorities OceanIQ^® successfully applied their experience of engineering in other parts of the world which have busy continental shelves, such as the North Sea, South China Sea and West Africa, to protect and minimise the risk to the cable.

The team produced a desk top study which incorporated many months of research into all the risk factors influencing the cable routing decisions. These included geological data on surface seabed sediments, fishing effort spatial distribution, hydrocarbon industry infrastructure, maritime legislative boundaries, dredging, offshore renewable energy developments and existing telecommunications cables.

Another crucial factor in ensuring the cable’s security over its design life was the ability to utilise OceanIQ’s^® cable fault database. The database is an industry leading collection of fault data covering the vast majority of commercial cables installed since 1959, made possible by our almost unique uninterrupted involvement in cable maintenance in the Atlantic in the 20th and 21st centuries. This led directly to some of the cable armouring recommendations in both the shallow and deep water sections of the Hibernia Express route.

The result was a unique and well engineered route for what became the first transatlantic cable laid since 2003. Our main objective was met with a subsea RTD (Round Trip Delay) between Canada and the United Kingdom of approximately 45 milliseconds, which is over 20 percent less than the next lowest latency cable.