Heavy lift specialist Dockwise has safely and successfully offloaded the 23,000-ton Lucius spar for the Lucius deepwater oil and gas project located in the US Gulf of Mexico.
The Lucius truss spar, measuring 184m in length by 34m in diameter, was loaded on to the Mighty Servant 1 by means of skid on operation at Technip’s Pori fabrication yard, Finland, where it was fabricated.
The spar was then transported 7,700 nautical miles and discharged at Ingleside, Texas, and delivered back to Technip. It is at Ingleside that the platform’s topsides will be married to the structure built in Finland.
The Lucius development is located at Keathley Canyon block 875 and is operated by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.
Spars are usually offloaded over the stern of a semi-submersible heavy transport vessel. However, due to the restricted clearance space at Ingleside, an innovative offloading approach was required.
The engineering team at Dockwise developed an approach whereby the spar was unloaded over the side necessitating the design and installation of new buoyancy tanks.
The Lucius spar pushed the Mighty Servant I’s carrying capacity to its limit, extending nearly 40m over the stern of the vessel.
With the commissioning of the Dockwise Vanguard early this year, Dockwise considers itself to be strategically well positioned to accommodate larger structure sizes in the future.
The company is today a part of the Dutch group Boskalis, the takeover having been completed in March this year.