Offshore Group Newcastle (OGN) has secured a £50M deal for the design and fabrication of an oil and gas ‘jacket’ – a huge, steel, offshore platform support structure which is fixed to the sea-bed – for operator Talisman Sinopec Energy UK’s MonArb project.
OGN awarded Vulcan (Sheffield Forgemasters’ specialist offshore technology and project management division), a multimillion pound contract to design and manufacture the jacket castings – two pad eyes each weighing 27t and two 55t trunnion nodes. The pad eyes and nodes will form high strength and fatigue resistant joints to connect the main leg and brace tubulars which make up the jacket structure. These components will allow the massive jacket weighing 5.4kt to be lifted, rotated and installed on the sea-bed at its location in the Montrose/Arbroath field. The jacket structure will support a deck weighing 10kt.
The jacket, nearly 120m long, will be ready in spring 2014 with installation expected in summer that year. Vulcan also worked with OGN on the supply of cast steel pad-eyes for the recent Apache oil platform in the Forties oilfield, the largest oil field in the North Sea.