With offshore of oil and gas fields in the North Sea being located in up to 140 m of water depth, any structures to be fabricated for such an environment were of a scale and weight that required construction equipment featuring significant reach and lifting capacity. When building large Jacket and Topsides structures a balance has to be struck between the capital expense of heavy lifting / transport equipment and the benefits in efficiency and schedule gained from possessing such equipment. In simple terms an objective of maximising fabrication works at ground level reduces the amount of costly time-consuming work required at high level. The way to achieve this is to be able to lift as few large, heavy components as possible to complete any structure.
In making this assessment McDermott followed a strategy where they owned an extensive array of heavy plant including a variety of cranes, multi axle trailers, etc. Being thus well equipped allowed the Yard to offer unique lifting and handling capabilities providing the flexibility to cope with overlapping project workloads of varying weight and size characteristics. Having such a large fleet of equipment available for example gave the ability on occasion to deploy up to 13 crawler cranes on complete Jacket outer frame roll ups including the pile sleeve assemblies.
During a period of intense Jacket and Topsides building activity in the early to mid-1980’s the Yard reached a high point in its inventory of lift equipment with the introduction a crane type known as the Lampson Transi-Lift to add to its fleet of Manitowoc and Skyhorse cranes. The Lampson was capable of lifting up to 1,350 Tonnes and upon recognising the flexibility of the crane, a second Lampson was purchased to meet the challenging build programme on the Yard at the time. As shown on the images featuring the Lampson cranes, the reach and lifting capacity available when the cranes worked in tandem offered a solution to otherwise complex heavy lifts and loadouts.
In addition to the cranes there was an extensive in-house inventory of mobile equipment to support Yard activity which included telescopic cranes, multi axle trailers, a range of forklifts capable of lifting up to 70 Tonnes, side-boom track machines, winch and trailer trucks etc The images in this Facilities Section show examples of heavy lift and other equipment being deployed with many more images being included in the Projects section.