GIGA
Galileo Integrated Georeference Applications

E.ON Ruhrgas, a large player in the European energy industry, recently decided to tackle safety and security-related risks and the negative economic impact from accidents. Excavation works threaten to damage pipelines, and pipes are destroyed in construction and maintenance activities mainly because of unavailable or inaccurate georeferences.

This causes high immediate costs as well as follow-up costs to the European economy. Vulnerability to permanent or temporary disruption of energy supply was dramatically confirmed by a recent pipeline accident in Belgium in July 2004. As a consequence, E.ON Ruhrgas decided to develop a full-scale GNSS-based application to significantly reduce this cost position in the entire E.ON Ruhrgas group of consolidated companies.

In Europe, such a GNSS-based solution is still lacking in user community energy. Without public co-funding, E.ON Ruhrgas would have focused on its internal application only, as resources for a commercial application and for business development would most probably not be available within the medium term. GIGA brings together a consortium of complementary partners which take the E.ON Ruhrgas application concept and develop it to a commercial application for the European energy community. The expected impact of GIGA’s results (a commercial GNSS-solution for the special user community energy together with the appropriate steps for concurrent business development) becomes clearer when seen from the viewpoint of Europe’s high dependency on fossil fuels, both internally and externally.

GIGA intends to introduce satellite navigation technology in user community (UC) energy processes with a special view on current satellite positioning systems like, for example, GPS and GLONASS and the future European Galileo system.

Objectives

GIGA aims at analysing, demonstrating and disseminating the benefits of EGNOS and Galileo (+GPS) for high precision positioning applications in the area of energy exploitation and supply. GIGA will help to increase the awareness on Galileo/EGNOS and the related chances and positive impacts for the ‘energy’ community. Measures and technologies will be defined, developed and made known to UC energy by using design concepts, demonstrators and public events. The project is defined in three phases:

• Phase I: Critical analysis
• Phase II: Demonstrator implementation
• Phase III: Results analysis.