Lankhorst Euronete Portugal has completed the engineering, design, fabrication and delivery of the deepwater mooring rope for the Shell Appomattox project. At over 63,000 metres, it is the longest ever rope meterage for a single deepwater mooring contract.
The Shell Appomattox facility will be a four-column semi-submersible production platform moored using 16 mooring lines arranged in 4×4 clusters, in 2,255 metres of water approximately 130 kilometres offshore Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. Lankhorst is supplying 78 rope lengths totalling over 63,000 metres of its Gama 98 polyester deepwater mooring rope with minimum breaking strength of 21,545 kiloNewtons.
The Gama 98 ropes were manufactured at Lankhorst’s factory, dedicated to the production of offshore mooring systems, in Viana do Castelo, Portugal. Upon contract award, a significant amount of preparation was required before production of the ropes could begin including design and installation of new equipment to handle the size and payload of the ropes. In addition, a period of prototype rope testing was conducted to verify and prove the rope design. This testing included: breaking strength; linear density; stiffness; splice qualification and particle filter testing.
The project involved a number of industry and Lankhorst firsts. These included: the first time two mooring ropes have been packed on a single reel, the largest reels ever handled with a six metre diameter and 6.8 metre traverse and the heaviest reels ever handled with a weight of approximately 120 tonnes. A total of 78 ropes of 273 millimetres diameter were manufactured in lengths of 304, 762 and 914 metres.
“Our ability to successfully complete this most challenging project reinforces Lankhorst’s position as the global leader in deepwater mooring,” said Neil Schulz, sales director, Lankhorst Ropes Offshore. “By combining our technical expertise with the industry’s leading rope engineering and production capability, we’ve been able to meet the most demanding requirements for this showcase project.”
