AUSTIN, Texas – ARMS Reliability has been engaged by Qatar Cool – one of the largest district cooling providers in the Middle East and amongst the top five in the world – to help the utility company understand where it is regarding asset management, to identify where the business currently has asset management gaps, and to recommend actions for improvement.
“Qatar Cool provides vital chilled water energy to thousands of clients in residential and commercial towers, villas, rail, and malls,” affirms Sanjay Jain, ARMS Reliability’s Commercial Manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “In a location with an average temperature over 100°F for five months of the year, Qatar Cool’s customers need its service in order to stay safe, healthy, and comfortable – so the company must be able to provide this essential service without interruptions.”
District Cooling circulate chilled water through a closed-loop pipe distribution network to a district and its buildings. Constant cooling is critical for not only Qatar’s current residents, but the country is also slated to host the soccer World Cup tournament in 2022, which means many new infrastructure projects being constructed, each of which will require dependable sustainable cooling.
“As part of its internal improvement process, Qatar Cool selected ARMS Reliability to conduct an Asset Management and Reliability Audit,” Jain explains. “They charged us with determining the current level of asset management maturity at Qatar Cool, then offering recommendations to help the utility improve – with the ultimate goal of Qatar Cool managing its assets efficiently and effectively in order to meet customer needs through safe and reliable service.”
The ARMS team spent two weeks in Qatar Cool to perform its audit: interviewing key personnel from the Operations, Services, Procurements, Business Excellence, Human Resources, and Technical [which includes Reliability] divisions; reviewing documentation and evidence; and doing facility walkthroughs of Qatar Cool’s district cooling plants. The team’s assessment mapped and measured performance in seven key areas – strategy, organization and human resources, work planning and scheduling, maintenance tactics, materials management, performance management, and reliability engineering – assigning each area a Maturity Ranking.
“Our audit concluded that overall, Qatar Cool’s asset management result indicates solid understanding. Our audit also leaves a clear indication of improvement opportunities,” confirms Jain.
“Qatar Cool’s vision is to be recognized as the best-in-class provider of district cooling services – not just in Qatar, but worldwide,” Jain adds. “Improving their asset-management capabilities is a great start; this process will definitely help the company deliver superior service to their customers, while also helping better their overall safety, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and environmental impact. We’re proud to be partnering with Qatar Cool and to be part of their asset-management journey toward operational excellence.”
About Qatar Cool
Qatar Cool is the leading district cooling company in Qatar. Since its inception, Qatar Cool has aimed for operational excellence in every aspect of its business. Over the past 15 years, the company has developed solid technical and operational experience and has refined its approach on both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) fronts. Currently, Qatar Cool is the leading commercial provider of district cooling services in Qatar.
Qatar Cool currently owns and operates four cooling plants covering the West Bay and The Pearl-Qatar districts with the combined capacity of 237,000 tons of refrigeration.
Qatar Cool takes the environmental impact of district cooling very seriously. District cooling plants are operated more efficiently with less harm to the environment by eliminating such things as carbon dioxide, possible gas leak, and noise pollution. District cooling offers major environmental benefits and allows us to economize on natural resources. Over the past nine years, Qatar Cool has saved over 2.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, in turn reducing over 1.2 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. The CO2 reductions are equivalent to removing over 237 thousand cars off the road or planting over 16 million mature trees, which would populate over 46 thousand football pitches.
Qatar Cool has recently completed the conversion of two of its West Bay cooling plants to accept Treated Sewage Effluent (TSE) into its operations. To date, we have saved over 2 million m3 of potable water in the two cooling plants. To put this into context, the potable water saved thus far is enough to run around 3,000 average sized villas in Qatar per year.
