£2 Billion Oil and Gas Vessel Nears Completion
Posted 24/11/2014 00:00
Swiss company, Allseas have confirmed that their new offshore vessel the Pieter Scheite, is currently undertaking sea trials and is on-route to Rotterdam from South Korea.
First visualised over 25 years ago, the vessel is the brain child of Allseas founder and owner, Edward Heerema and is said to be the largest vessel in the world.
The new class of vessel is designed primarily for the decommissioning sector with the ability to quickly remove and transport complete oil installations for decommissioning onshore. The vessel can also be used for jacket and topsides installation and will also become the largest pipe-laying vessel in the world, dwarfing the companies Solitaire vessel that currently holds the title.
The Pieter Scheite is 382m long, 124m wide and has a lift capacity of 48,000 tonnes but can haul up to 73,000 tonnes at once. With accommodation for 571 people it could also claim the title of the industry’s first cruise liner it is so large.
The contract to build the vessel was awarded to Dewoo’s Okpo yard in 2010 and construction started 2011. Long-lead items such as the power generation equipment, the thrusters and the DP systems were ordered as far back as 2007.
In Early 2015 the vessel will sail from its specially constructed pit at the port of Rotterdam and head to the South Stream project in the Black Sea where it will start it’s working life laying a pipeline there, an operation Allseas will be more than familiar with.
Managing Director of Oil and Gas People, Kevin Forbes said: “I was fortunate enough to spend some time working for Allseas on their solitaire vessel several years ago and to imagine a vessel close to twice the size of the solitaire is hard to contemplate. It just shows what our industry is capable of and is a brilliant example of foresight, technology and engineering coming together to solve the challenges that our industry will face over the coming decades.”
Allseas have said that the overwhelming interest in the Peter Scheite since they announced it in 2007 has already lead them to start planning to build a second vessel which will be even bigger at 400m long, 160m wide and with a world record breaking lift capacity of 77,000 tonnes. They expect the vessel to be in operation around 2020
The title of world's biggest ship is difficult to define, but the largest floating vessel currently in operation is the Shell Prelude, a 488m (1,601ft) long platform for liquefied natural gas anchored in a South Korean port.
However the vessel is unable to propel itself, leading to questions as to whether it can actually be classified as a “ship".
The world's longest moving vessel is the Maersk Triple E class, a family of container ships each of which is 400m (1,312ft) in length.
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