The Northern Endeavour floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel has taken its final journey to Denmark.
The FPSO has arrived safely at Modern American Recycling Services (MARS) Europe’s ship recycling facility in Frederikshavn, Denmark.
It left Singapore in February and made the 8-week voyage on COSCO Shipping Heavy Transport’s semi-submersible heavy transport vessel, the Hua Rui Long.
To prepare for the voyage to MARS, the lead contractor, Petrofac Facilities Management Limited, oversaw works on the FPSO at the Seatrium yards in Singapore.
Works included:
- cleaning the hull and removing antifouling paint
- repainting the hull to prevent any further degradation
- removing protrusions from the bottom of the hull that would have prevented the FPSO from loading onto the heavy transport vessel
- removing the flare and weather towers to allow safe passage under bridges through the Suez Canal
installing fasteners to safely secure the FPSO to the heavy transport vessel.
Loading the FPSO onto the Hua Rui Long required a coordinated effort. This involved 8 tugs and 2 line-handling vessels. The entire process to load the FPSO took 6.5 hours.
The Hua Rui Long is one of only a few vessels worldwide able to transport something as big as the 274 m long FPSO. It’s the third largest semi-submersible heavy transport vessel currently operating.
The focus of the Northern Endeavour decommissioning program has now shifted to phase 2 to permanently plug and abandon the oil wells.
