Water Supply for World-Record Ship

April 2011Record order for Eddelbüttel & Schneider and the ContiTech Beattie Cooperation: In close collaboration, the two companies supplied the water intake system for the world’s largest FPSO vessel. FPSO vessels are gigantic ships that process and store petroleum and natural gas until the raw materials can be picked up by tankers.

“Oil is becoming ever more scarce, which is why even extremely small traces are now being extracted from the sea,” reports Marcus Prinz, general manager of Eddelbüttel & Schneider (E & S). As a result, the use of mobile FPSO units has become a lucrative business representing a gigantic growth market. “And together with ContiTech Beattie in the US and England, we are at the front of the pack,” Prinz emphasizes. E & S, Germany, develops the lines that are required to cool the systems on the ships.

For significant reserves, FPSO ships are built with extra features especially for the surroundings. Their main components are the production systems – primarily separators used to separate the material. The lines from E & S used here to cool the production systems have a gigantic job to do. As many as 25 million liters of seawater flow through the largest FPSO vessels per hour. The deeper the transport pipeline reaches into the sea, the lower the temperature of the water and the better the cooling effect, thus increasing the profitability of the FPSO. This is where the advantages of the 32 hoses from E & S come into play. With these hoses, the line can be lengthened at will. And their high dimensional stability ensures that sufficient cooling water is always available – even if is pumped from extreme depths where the hose walls are subjected to enormous forces. The individual hoses, which are roughly 12 m long, have an inner diameter of more than 60 cm. These hoses are put together to form four lines each with a length of 100 m. Each of these lines weighs more than 25 tons.

Nowadays, the record-breaking ship, built by Hyundai Heavy Industries with a price tag of 1.3 billion euros for the French oil corporation Total, can hold more than 2 million barrels of oil. It is 320 m long, 61 m wide, 32 m tall and weighs 116,000 tons. The lines from Eddelbüttel & Schneider also hold a record for length: all together, a good 700 m of hose. The ship is to be put into service in March next year in the Usan oil field 100 km south of Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

Another FPSO unit, the “Pazflor”, will be turned over by Hyundai to its operator Total in the coming months. This vessel’s water intake system was also supplied by Eddelbüttel & Schneider to the Korean shipyard Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME). Prinz is certain about one thing: “The Pazflor will be even bigger, even more gigantic.” More than 125 E & S hoses with inner diameters ranging from 38 to 100 cm and individual lengths of roughly 6 m make up a total of 12 lines. ContiTech has already been awarded the follow-up order: Together, E+S, ContiTech Beattie and Dunlop Oil & Marine are supplying a complete package for an FPSO that will be used in the CLOV oil and gas fields northwest off the coast of Angola.

Another major order for an FPSO has been received by the ContiTech company Dunlop Oil & Marine. The Sakhalin Energy Investment Company (SEIC) ordered two complete hose systems for the transportation of crude oil in winter from a FPSO off the coast of the Russian island of Sakhalin to a buoy which serves to moor, discharge, and fill tankers. Each system consists of six individual hoses, which are linked together to make up a total length of 67 meters.