Heerema Vlissingen, one of the three production locations of Heerema Fabrication Group (HFG), successfully completed the construction and installation of the state-of-the-art F3-FA mobile production platform of Centrica Energy in the F3-FA Field on the Dutch Continental shelf on 4 September.

Heerema Vlissingen was awarded the EPCI (Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Installation) contract in February 2009 by Centrica Energy for the largest gas platform of its kind to be installed anywhere in the world. This innovative gas platform is self-installing and portable so that it can be moved to a new location once production from the F3-FA field is complete.

The platform has a total height of 133 metres of which the legs are 75 meters long and weigh 1,200t each. The topsides have a weight of 4,000 tonnes and are 50 metres wide, 30 metres long and 30 metres in height. The total weight of the platform is 8,800 tonnes.

Tino Vinkesteijn, managing director of Heerema Zwijndrecht and Heerema Vlissingen said: “This is already the second major project to be completed this year by Heerema Fabrication Group, which once more demonstrates our excellent project management capabilities. It’s a major achievement for our project team when it comes to managing all the inter- faces of this complex project, to be finished well ahead of time. Centrica selected Heerema Fabrication Group as its partner for the execution of this project based on its experience and solution-driven approach. Technically it was a challenging project, as this technology has never been used before on a platform of this size in the harsh North Sea environment.

“Completion of this platform has generated various milestones for our Vlissingen yard”, according to Frank Slangen, overall project manager of Heerema Vlissingen. “This unique platform is the largest to date ever built at our Vlissingen yard and has been fabricated in record-time of less than one year. It created approximately 1,000,000 man hours of work for Heerema Vlissingen and its direct subcontractors. To successfully execute this project on-time a large number of subcontractors were appointed, which created a challenge for project management to manage the entire scope with all its interfaces. Also thanks to our partners Iv-Oil & Gas and SPT Offshore, we succeeded to adapt the concept to a much larger scale of this platform”, continues Frank.

John Brusik, project manager Centrica Energy, continues: “It has been an extremely challenging and phase-built design pushing several boundaries. It uses four huge five-storey high suction buckets each big enough to hold more than 2.5 million litres of water to anchor it in position. The self-installed platform was towed more than 200 kilometres from the Netherlands to the F3-FA field. With completion of the successful installation we have reached a fantastic milestone.”

“A magnificent performance of the entire project team. Only few will realize that a master piece has been executed’, according to Rob van der Waal , managing director of Iv-Groep.

Mark Riemers, managing director of SPT Offshore adds: “This has been a massive achievement. After more than 1,5 years of hard work and facing many challenges we managed to successfully install the platform well before the contractual date .”

Tags: Heerema Fabrication Group