Seaway Heavy Lifting is moving into a new league in offshore renewables, taking on contracts on an engineering, procurement, construction and installation basis. Elaine Maslin found out more.
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Handling foundations and transition pieces. Photos from Seaway Heavy Lifting. |
Dutch offshore contractor Seaway Heavy Lifting (SHL) is set to shift up a gear in its offshore wind expertise.
The firm, which owns and operates two heavy lift vessels, already has an impressive string of offshore wind transport and installation projects under its belt, having been an early mover into the offshore wind business. To date, it has installed 15 substations, 450 monopiles and 275 transition pieces, weighing a total 416,000-tonne. It is also setting records in terms of foundation installation rates.
Its latest awarded project, however, the Beatrice Offshore Wind farm, a 588MW wind park in Scotland’s Outer Moray Firth, will see it step up to take on an engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) role. Fabrication contracts have been issued to the subcontractors Bladt, SIF (Read more: Increasing capacity), BiFab, Smulders and EEW for the fabrication of foundation components, i.e. jackets and piles. Offshore construction is due to run from April 2017 through Q3 2018, using SHL’s heavy lift vessels Stanislav Yudin and Oleg Strashnov. SHL, in alliance with its 50% owner, Subsea 7, will lead the design, engineering, fabrication, transport and installation of the park’s 84 monopile foundations and two offshore transmission stations, plus array and export cables.
SHL CEO Jan Willem van der Graaf, who led Subsea 7’s renewables business, before it was transferred into SHL in 2013, is keen to stress that Subsea 7 will very much take a back seat role on the project. Subsea 7 brings execution power and financial power. But, SHL has been tasked by Subsea 7 on the project and has been both building up itself and its processes internally, as well as working with contractors, such as engineering firm Atkins, he says.
“It’s all about managing the risks and having some of your best people on the project. Some have come from Subsea 7, some from SHL and some from the market. It means having better document control systems, very good contract management, making sure everything runs on time and people communicate.” Van der Graaf is confident this can be done. “We have done a lot of large subcontracting before, and installation-wise, it’s not a big issue for us. It’s a repetition of one installation 84 times. Logistics will be important, being there on time, but it’s not difficult work. It’s also doing it faster.”
SHL has been working up to the job. It has a track record of renewables projects under its belt.
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Installing the SylWin converter station. |
A notable project was the installation of the 14,000-tonne SylWin alpha converter platform in 2014, using a novel floatover method. The jacket was installed using SHL’s crane vessel Oleg Strashnov. Then, in spite of the Oleg Strashnov’s high capacity, additional buoyancy was used to aid the lift of the 14,000-tonne converter station topside. This involved buoyancy tanks and additional buoyancy on the pontoon, which transported the converter station and was then positioned between the jacket legs and ballasted to lower the topside onto the jacket. This was the only North Sea floatover installation known to have been conducted, van der Graaf says.
SylWin is one of the world’s largest converter platforms, installed west of Sylt, offshore Germany, and serving as a “power socket” for the DanTysk, Sandbank and Butendiek wind farms, which together comprise 240 wind turbines and represent a generating capacity of 864MW. SHL was the lead contractor and used fellow Dutch firms Dockwise and Mammoet for the job.
Van der Graaf says that SHL has also been setting records when it comes to monopile foundation installation. On the Dudgeon wind farm, in the UK offshore, it has been doing monopile and transition piece installation in less than a day from the same vessel, instead of using one vessel for each task, he says. “For us the transition piece is a matter of hours, it doesn’t pay to have a separate spread,” he says.
Looking ahead, he says it will be important to keep up with growth in the renewables business, especially with the size of foundations, moving towards 10m-diameter, and turbines, already at 8MW units, and how these are accommodated and what equipment is used with them. ”I think we need to get ready for growth in size in the future, that’s part of the trick to making wind power cheaper,” he says.
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Jan Willem van der Graaf |
But, SHL, which has some 800 staff, about half based offshore, is far from abandoning its oil and gas business. Last year, for example, SHL completed one of the biggest lifting campaigns in the North Sea, to help install the Cygnus field facilities in the southern North Sea. This involved lifting in place four platforms, one of which set a record for SHL. The process platform topsides weighed 4700-tonne, the most SHL’s Oleg Strashnov had ever lifted.
The firm has never been limited to the North Sea either. In 2015, SHL’s vessels moved from Mexico to Brazil, to the North Sea, then the Arctic, before going back to the North Sea then on to Nigeria.
Renewables offers a stream of work to balance out oil and gas work, including decommissioning, van der Graaf says. With the oil and gas industry in a “holding pattern,” renewables work is welcome business. Having flexible vessels helps. The 30-year-old Stanislav Yudin recently had a US$50 million upgrade to make it suitable for use for another 15 years. The Oleg Strashnov, delivered in 2011, is still relatively new.
But, while moving into an EPCI is the goal, SHL isn’t looking to take design in-house, preferring to use others for what they’re good at. “We do what we’re good at,” van der Graaf says.
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