World's Biggest Crane Ship Sets Another Record

The superlarge crane ship Sleipnir has set another record: the largest single-lift jacket removal.

Last week, Sleipnir successfully lifted and removed the 8,100 tonne jacket for the Jotun-B platform in the Norwegian North Sea. The platform was installed in 1998 by the Heerema crane ship Thialf, which returned to the Jotun field last year to remove the plaform's topsides.

"What we put in, we take out," Heerema said in a statement.

Sleipnir arrived at the Jotun field 100 nm west of Stavanger on Friday, July 11. She completed the project by offloading the jacket onto the quayside at a decommissioning site in Vats, Norway on Thursday, July 16. The decommissioning work at the site was completed in just four days, one day ahead of schedule.

Images courtesy Heerema

The job also set another record: during this project, skirt piles with diameters of nine feet and 80mm wall thickness were cut subsea, the largest ever severed in this way. 

"We set records to break them, and we are proud to have worked alongside our client Vår Energi to complete the Jotun-B removal with mighty Sleipnir safely, sustainably, and in the shortest possible time," said Heerema’s CEO, Koos-Jan van Brouwershaven.

With two 10,000-tonne cranes and a 240,000 square foot reinforced deck, Sleipner is the world's largest crane vessel. She set a world record for a crane vessel lift last September when she placed a 15,000 tonne topsides module on Noble Energy's new Leviathan platform. (Allseas' Pioneering Spirit, which is not a crane vessel, won the topsides lift record last year with the 26,000 tonne processing platform unit for the Johan Sverdrup field.)