Crane Marine Contractor to transport ice resistance platform from Astrakhan to Kaliningrad
When completed, Gazprom’s ice resistance platform will be transported from Astrakhan to Kaliningrad by Crane Marine Contractor LLC (a company of United Shipbuilding Corporation), Dmitry Ryndin, General Director of Crane Marine Contractor, told IAA PortNews.
According to him, transportation of oversize cargo is among the company’s key activities.
The fleet of Crane Marine Contractor numbers two floating cranes, Bogatyr-3 and Volgar, the carrying capacity of which is 300 tons and 1,550 tons respectively, the pontoon "Sevan" with the carrying capacity of 5,330 tons, the pontoon "Margon" with the carrying capacity of 6,800 tons, as well as two tugboats of 300 h.p. in capacity (“RBT-16” and “RBT-319”) and a pusher tug “BT-337” of 300 h.p. in capacity.
Tugboats of Crane Marine Contractor have been recently involved in assisting the newly launched chemical tanker PortNews.
A foundation-laying ceremony for an ice-resistant platform (IRP) of Gazprom, which will be used in the development of the Kamennomysskoye-Sea field, took place on 25 June 2020 at the shipyard of Southern Shipbuilding and Repair Center (part of United Shipbuilding Corporation) in the Astrakhan Region.
The ice-resistant platform of Gazprom (IRP «А») will be used to build 33 main directional production wells (later on, another 22 wells for maintaining production rates will be placed on satellite ice-resistant conductor platforms that do not require permanent presence of personnel). The extracted gas will be fed into pipelines and arrive onshore into a comprehensive gas treatment unit and a booster compressor station. After that, the gas will go into Russia's Unified Gas Supply System.
The platform will be more than 135 meters long, 69 meters wide, 41 meters tall from the base to the helicopter pad, and its weight will exceed 40,000 tons in total.
The Kamennomysskoye-Sea gas field is located in the Ob Bay of the Kara Sea. The field is unique in terms of its gas reserves, which amount to some 555 billion cubic meters. Production operations are due to commence in 2025, with a design output (for Cenomanian deposits) of 15 billion cubic meters per year.
The field is situated in a marine environment characterized by low temperatures (up to minus 60 degrees Celsius), heavy storms, shallow depths (5–12 meters), and thick and dense freshwater ice. The development of this field will become the first shelf project in the world to be implemented in such extreme ice and climate conditions.
Particular attention in the project is paid to solutions aiming to prevent adverse impacts on the Arctic flora and fauna. This includes a zero discharge system: all household and production waste will be removed from the platform and disposed of later.
In order to build a facility of this technological complexity, several Russian shipbuilding and machine-building centers are providing their capacities according to the 'distributed shipyard' principle. Separate components of the platform will be simultaneously put together in Astrakhan, Kaliningrad, Severodvinsk, Yekaterinburg, and Rybinsk. The ICP will be finally assembled in one piece in Kaliningrad. In the summer navigation period of 2024, it is planned to tow the ICP to the field, after which flare booms and a helicopter pad will be set up at the facility. Construction operations will involve about 7,000 Russian workers and specialists.
