In the last issue, we already wrote about activities of CHANDLER Group which is involved in transporting abnormal-sized and heavy equipment for Ryazan oil refinery. The equipment is coming from USA and Japan. The volume of the whole batch is 4,730 freight tons.
It was in the last issue that we described the American stage of this transport operation. As for the Japanese route, the heaviest pieces of cargo passed through it within this project – these are four 295-ton reactors. A SAL Heavy Lift vessel had been chartered to ship this freight along the route Port of Moji – Antwerp. The whole batch was comprised of those four reactors and a separator weighing 149 tons, plus additional equipment – 58 boxes. The reactors and the separator were reloaded from barges on the ship by deck cranes. It took one day and a half to load and fasten all the equipment.
As per the contract, the equipment had to be shipped from manufacturers’ works in USA and Japan, and then delivered by sea to Europe’s main port specializing in project freight transhipment – Antwerp. It is there that two ocean-going vessels from USA and Japan with 8,880 m³ of load arrived in early June.
This stage of the route was successfully completed, and after that, the cargo was split into two parts, using the plan developed by Sovfracht specialists (General Forwarder for the project) in advance. The most oversize and heavy equipment in the amount of 8 pieces was loaded on the barge “Damen River 3” and dispatched to Ryazan with an intermediate stop in the Port of Rotterdam.
Deck and harbor cranes were used to load the main overweight items weighing up to 300 tons (four reactors) on a specialized river-sea pontoon. Apart from the reactors, the following cargoes were loaded: a fractionator weighing 95 tons, 51 meters long and 4.5 meters in diameter; a stripper weighing 50 tons, 37 meters long and 4 meters in diameter; a 129-ton recycle gas scrubber and a hot separator weighing 149 tons. According to the approved schedule, the cargo was supposed to be discharged on the temporary jetty in the vicinity of Ryazan.
The second part of equipment (more than 200 items of ancillaries weighing up to 55 tons per item and up to 5 meters in diameter) was reloaded on the river-sea vessel in Antwerp and shipped through Saint Petersburg. There, the cargo went through customs clearance on the basis of the RF FCS customs classification which had been obtained for RNPK (Ryazan Oil Refinery Company) beforehand, and was forwarded to Nizhny Novgorod. This port was selected as the most convenient location in the context of technical potential to handle the transported loads and proximity to the final destination. Load-in in Nizhny Novgorod port finished on July 7 and became the “equator” of the whole transport process.
And now, the equipment will have to be delivered from Nizhny Novgorod to Ryazan site by motor transport and in parallel, it will be required to let the barge with out-of-gauge cargoes travel through Russia’s inland waterways and, finally, to arrange meeting of all parts of the route at RNPK.
To be continued…