Irkutsk Oil Company built special berth to accept equipment for its polymer plant
The first batch of equipment is expected in Ust-Kut by the end of this week
Irkutsk Oil Company (INK) says it built a special berth on the Lena river to accept equipment for Irkutsk Polymer Plant (IPP).
The berth’s length is 113 meters, or 310 meters including the approaches. Two 750-tonne caterpillar cranes will be installed on the berth for handling of oversize equipment.
The berth construction began in September 2019.
Equipment manufactured for IPP by the leaders of the Global Engineering industry in Japan, Korea and China was loaded onto two ice class vessels in the Korean port of Masan left for Russia on June 30. It took them three weeks to cover 8,500 kilometers along the Northern Sea Route to the Russian port of Tiksi where the equipment was transshipped onto nine barges of Lena United River Shipping Company (LORP) for further transportation to Ust-Kut. In August, LORP fleet passed 3,600 kilometers down the Lena river.
The unloading will involve about 40 people and 52 Self Propelled Module Transporters. The largest pieces of equipment are a 81.9-meter long ethylene column weighing 357 tonnes, a 53.5-meter long blow-down unit weighing almost 500 tonnes and a 44.5-meter long polymerisation reactor weighing 597 tonnes.
The annual production capacity of the plant will be at least 650 thousand tons of highly demand production. Polymers are used in automobile and aircraft manufacturing, the space industry, medicine, and the consumer goods industry. The feedstock for the IPP will be ethane extracted from natural and associated petroleum gas produced at the fields of the INK group. The plant will offer 1,500 jobs.
The latest and most highly efficient technologies that meet the strictest international environmental requirements were used for the plant construction. Toyo Engineering Corporation, Japanese engineering company, has been involved in implementing the project. Both ethylene and polyethylene productions will be similar to the modern plants which were built in Europe and the USA.
LORP expects its barges to deliver the equipment on August 22 provided that the hydrological and meteorological conditions are favourable.
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