Vessels apart
06 May 2008
Heavy lifting and transport specialist Mammoet was contracted for a project in Canada to provide heavy lifting services for two refineries. One is in Sarnia, Ontario and the other is 3200 km (1920 miles) away in Edmonton, Alberta. Both projects involved the erection of a large reactor vessel, weighing approximately 750 tonnes.
Mammoet designed and built a guyless lifting system to accommodate the needs of both lifts. This required that the tower had a lifting capacity high enough to lift both reactors and, for the Edmonton project, the ability to shift the reactor to one side of the tower once lifting was complete. Both reactors were approximately 30 m long, so a tower height of 50 m was used for both lifts.
Equipment was mobilised from various locations around the world to assemble the tower system: the large top beams were imported from a project in Libya, the strand jack equipment was brought in from Trinidad and the Netherlands, and the tower structures were imported from the US. The design team comprised engineers in both Canada and the Netherlands.
Mammoet supplied tailing cranes for both lifts. In Sarnia tailing was done with a Demag CC 2600 crawler and Mammoet provided a CC 2800 to tail the Edmonton reactor.