Increasing construction and installation activity globally is driving a demand for fabrication and manufacturing capabilities.
With its shipbuilding and petrochemical heritage, northeast England is rising to meet the challenge. From a cluster of towns centering on Newcastle, Darlington, and Teesside, umbilicals for Australia’s Wheatstone and Angola’s Lianzi developments will be made at a new umbilical manufacturing plant.
J-lay towers for newbuild cable-lay vessels, destined for Brazil, are being fabricated in the area, alongside launch and recovery systems (LARS) for the global market. Deepsea mining technology, to be used offshore Australasia, is being developed and manufactured here.
Martin Moon, managing director of Darlington-based Subsea Innovation, says: “The strength of the northeast is that it has always had a strong engineering background. I moved here 35 years ago to work in the shipyards, and the area still has the highest percentage of naval architects in the world, even though it is not building ships anymore.”
This has resulted in high levels of investment in the area in recent years.
In 2011, JDR Cable Systems opened a £40 million (US$62 million) subsea production umbilical and subsea power cable quayside manufacturing plant at Hartlepool.
Image: SMD's Quasar ROV, currently being built for Modus Seabed Intervention.
The same year, the site produced 200km of subsea array cables each for the London Array and Greater Gabbard offshore wind farms, southeast England. It is now shipping subsea production umbilicals, in carousels carrying up to 4000-tonne each, to southeast Asia from the facility.
A recent order will see JDR creating 10 custom-designed umbilicals, totaling 13km, for Swiber Offshore Construction to install on Brunei Shell’s Champion field, offshore Brunei.
Further umbilicals manufacturing capability is being created by DUCO, at Walker Riverside, Newcastle, also home to umbilicals manufacturer Wellstream, now part of GE Oil & Gas.
DUCO, a subsidiary of Technip, is building its Newcaflex manufacturing facility—a 57.8m-high building housing a vertical helix machine to manufacture umbilicals.
Newcaflex already has an order backlog out to 2016, in addition to work at its existing facility, with projects including Chevron’s Wheatstone and Lianzi project umbilicals, and 50km of umbilicals for Total’s Moho Nord development off Congo.
Image: IHC Engineering Business' Hi-Traq interarray cable trenching machine.
When it opens, early in 2014, Newcaflex will compliment a recently opened 14,500sq ft research and development facility, also at Walker, home to about 30 engineers and containing test rigs for umbilicals, for its offshore operations.
The region’s strength in subsea equipment, from ploughing and trenching systems to remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), is also attracting investment.
Subsea Innovation, a specialist in launch and recovery systems, tether handling systems and other subsea related equipment, led by Moon, has plans to add 40,000sq ft to its office and workshop space by this time next year. Darlington-based Modus Seabed Intervention, founded in 2008, launched a new AUV division, after buying a Remus 100 AUV, and has employed senior ex-navy staff to lead it. Modus is also due to take delivery of a 150hp Quasar ROV later this year.
The Quasar, built at Newcastle-based Soil Machine Dynamics (SMD), will be the first work class system to use SMD’s DVECS-S control system, along with technology developed by subsea vehicle software firm SeeByte, which together reduces pilot work-load and enables mission repeatability through auto-position controls, navigation map trail, cruise-control, advanced waypoint tracking, chart overlay, auto fly follow, and survey.
It was designed to work in high current areas and mostly targeted for offshore wind farms, but also oil and gas fields for survey, construction support, and IMR of subsea infrastructure.
Peter Imlah, technology director, says: “With technology like SeeByte, you can also better integrate control systems, allowing programming from point A to B, which, using sonar, the vehicle can then navigate. The longterm aim is to reduce the manpower needed to operate an ROV. For every ROV you need a team of 6-7 people. There will be more automation of activity, more reliability, and less maintenance.”
SMD itself is a key tenant in the region, designing and manufacturing ploughing and trenching equipment, ROVs, used globally, and now also deepsea mining technology.
It is currently completing production of three, heavy-duty, deepsea mining machines—an auxiliary machine, a bulk cutter, and a collection machine, incorporating technology from Caterpillar and Sandvik, for Canadian operator Nautilus to carry out copper, silver, and gold mining on the seabed off Papua New Guinea.
Another firm meeting new markets is IHC Merwede subsidiary IHC Engineering Business, based in Stocksfield. It has designed a new trenching system, Hi-Traq, specifically for the burial of onshore wind farm inter-array power cables.
Image: TAG Energy's production hall.
Product and systems development is a strong focus for the region, which is looking to build on its subsea expertise.
Plans were launched earlier this year for a new national subsea engineering center, the Neptune National Centre for Subsea and Offshore Engineering, to be led by Newcastle University, as part of a drive to develop new materials and technologies.
The region has applied for funding for new hyperbaric testing facilities, for subsea equipment. Valves manufacturer Bel Valves, at St Peters, Newcastle, is part of the group bidding for the hyperbaric facilities and is another company expanding.
Alison Ennis, Bel Valves marketing manager, says the company was early to focus on critical subsea applications, focusing on high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT), hydrogen sulfide, and deepwater, as well as developing all electric subsea systems, including single actuators for valves.
High-pressure fields, particularly, have driven change, she says, with a need for high-integrity, pressureprotection systems (HIPPS). Bel Valves has worked closely with BP in this area, including on the development of a subsea HIPPS for the Shah Deniz II project.
To meet demand, the company, owned by British Engines, plans to increase its premises by 30%, by relocating sister company hydraulics firm Rotary Power, freeing-up 12,500sq m.
This will enable it to create a dedicated test facility focusing on deep water, and HPHT. The next step, says Ennis, is moving in to even higher pressures, such as 20,000psi pressure through the pipeline.
“We are starting to look at limit of tolerance of metal itself,” she says.
“Pressures have continued to increase, which has meant products have got bigger and they cannot fit in the manifold. Then if they can get it in, they can’t get it out because it is heavy. We are looking at redesigns and alternative design metallurgy.”
Northeast England is still also home to large-scale fabrication, although not on the same scale as in the past. This summer, OGN, based at the Hadrian Yard, completed its first project, Apache’s Forties Alpha satellite platform. It is now working on the Monarb (Montrose/Arbroath) platform jacket for Talisman Sinopec Energy UK.
OGN wants to move into industrialscale production of jacket-based foundations for the offshore wind sector. However, the market has yet to fully emerge for offshore wind jackets and a new manufacturing facility to do the work requires US$100 million investment.
OGN, which can handle facilities weighing up to 13,000-tonne, is looking to work outside the North Sea, and looking to smaller work it could do at its Lowestoft yard, which has until now been dormant, says the firm’s Carl Jepson.
Another fabricator, TAG Energy, has made the move into the renewables market. The company opened at the 42-acre, former Furness and Swan Hunter shipyard on the River Tees in 2007, in order to build a topside for a deepwater semisubmersible.
The project was dropped by the client and TAG decided to refocus on renewables, raising £20 million in grants and equity funding to develop new facilities, with further £15 million invested since then.
Last year, TAG became the first company in the UK to start manufacturing offshore wind turbine monopiles and transition pieces, with a 24/7 operational linear manufacturing line. Alex Dawson, CEO at TAG, would like the site to be producing 60-100 monopiles and transition pieces per year. Diameters of the foundations have grown from 3-4m, when they were first being built, to 6-7m today. Dawson says designs for monopiles with 10m diameter are now on designer’s drawing tables.
There had been a move to use of jackets, but monopiles have been supporting turbines of up to 28-30m and are being extended to 35-36m, carrying bigger turbines, he says. Bigger turbines are coming. In August, the National Renewable Energy Centre (Narec), at Blyth, just north of Newcastle, took delivery of a 7MW Samsung wind turbine nacelle, which will be used to commission Narec’s £47 million (US$73 million) independent 15MW capacity test facility, before a six-month testing program begins on the nacelle.
Heavy engineering is not limited to jackets and wind turbine foundations. Allerton Steel, in North Yorkshire, works across industrial sectors, with a heritage in crane manufacturing. However, recent growth, particularly in the last five years, has come from the oil and gas sector.
From working on one to two oil and gas projects a year, oil and gas projects are now a permanent feature in the workshop and the sector accounts for 60-70% of the company’s turnover. These have mostly been structural elements, for topsides or jackets, but now Allerton is moving into mechanical plant, from J-lay towers to ROV launch and recovery systems and even an offshore wind turbine pile gripper for an installation vessel, recently installed. Paul Denning, a director at Allerton, says the company’s workshop is close to capacity and the firm is considering expansion.
It is a common theme in the northeast. Oilfield services firm Archer recently agreed a 10-year lease on a 22,000sq ft premises, and fluid transfer system FES International moved to a new manufacturing site in January, and is already considering further expansion.
Image: Allerton Steel constructs a J-Lay tower in North Yorkshire.
Tekmar, a subsea cable protection specialist, is adding 75,000sq ft to its 27,000sq ft facility.
Skills in the region are attracting firms to make their first step into the area, including JDR but also Marine engineering business Houlder, flexible pipe specialist Flexlife, and London Offshore Consultants.
“It is a resilient region with a good solid engineering base and with people who travel all over the world with their discipline and trades,” concludes Moon. OE
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