Blue Water has contracted to transport six semi-submersible drilling platforms with the shipbuilding company Keppel FELS, which build marine mobile drilling rigs, including lower hulls and pontoons, as the contractor said.
The contract was signed in early 2013. In total, the contractor will have to handle more than 600 thousand tons of cargo using land, sea towing, and vessels for carrying heavy cargoes.
“Now we are preparing to transport the lower hull of the drilling rig, 73 m wide, to Brazil. Therefore, we were forced to charter Dockwise Vanguard, the largest semisubmersible ship in the world, which will be loaded in Singapore in December,” said Lars Skov Christensen, project manager of Blue Water Singapore.
Using Xiang Li Xian
The vessel Xiang Li Xian is a cargo ship launched in 2016 under the flag of the state of Hong Kong. It has a length of 217 m and a width of 43 m. The gross tonnage is 35,949 tons. The pontoons, which form the basis of the lower hull, were sent from the Philippine shipyard Keppel Batangas to Singapore in early October, and for this part of the contract, Blue Water chartered the Xiang Rui Kou ship from the Chinese giant COSCO Heavy Transport. After the launch of the Xian flag of Singapore, the Blue Water towboats towed the pontoons to the raid parking lot, where the vessel took cargo on board. Five days later, the pontoons were unloaded in Singapore.
For the remaining four drilling rigs, no decision has yet been accepted on the loading and cargo configuration. Six installations are still being built in different locations in the Asian shipyards of the Keppel Group. The equipment will be retrofitted at the FELS shipyard in Angra dos Reis, Brazil.
Blue Water was established in 1972 in Esbjerg, where the company’s head office is now located. The founder of the company Kurt Skov is a chairman of the board of directors. The company has representative offices throughout Denmark, the countries of the North Atlantic, Western and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, the Far East, and the Americas.