Working inside Aramco facilities means designing to the SAES/SAEP mandatory standards, and the earthing scope is unforgiving about documentation.
The governing documents
- SAES-P-111 — Grounding, the primary earthing standard.
- SAES-P-100 series — general electrical system design requirements.
- IEEE 80 — referenced for substation step and touch voltage analysis.
- Project-specific Schedule Q and vendor approval requirements for materials.
Design points that draw comments
- Buried connections must be exothermically welded; mechanical connectors are for accessible, testable locations only.
- Conductor sizing must be justified against the actual fault current and clearing time, with the decrement factor shown.
- Equipment grounding, structural steel bonding and static bonding in hazardous areas each need explicit treatment.
- Resistance targets must be supported by measured resistivity, not assumed values.
- Materials require approved-vendor sourcing with certificates in the submittal.
The package reviewers expect
A complete submission includes the soil resistivity survey report with traverse locations, the earthing calculation (IEEE 80 output for substations, sizing calculations elsewhere), layout and detail drawings, material data sheets with vendor approvals, the ITP with hold points, and commissioning test records with ambient conditions. Missing any one of these is the usual cause of a rejected package — not the engineering.