How do you deal with waves when moving heavy loads from ship to offshore installations?  Barge Master, a Dutch company with 20 employees, has found a way to compensate for those movements in the heaviest of seas.

Spotlight_Award_OTC

Spotlight Award

Barge Master is the smallest company to win a Spotlight on New Technology award at this years Offshore Technology Conference wrapping up this Friday in Houston.

Its BM-T40 motion-compensated crane stands on hydraulic cylinder legs that respond individually to the movement of its host vessel, allowing it to lift up to 40 tons in seas with 15- to 20-foot waves. This represents a significant breakthrough, particularly for waters like the raucous North Sea, where Barge Master does a lot of its business.

“The T40 enables the ship to work more than 90 percent of the year,” says Eelko May, Barge Master’s technical director. “Other vessels can be limited to 50 to 60 percent. Sometimes these lifting operations are not possible at all.”

The T40 follows a much larger predecessor introduced in 2009, the T700, capable of loads up to 700 tons and used primarily during construction of offshore installations. Barge Master started work on the T40 in 2013 after Shell requested a smaller version for maintenance, major repairs and restarts.

Traditionally, operators build a crane into each rig for the heavy lifting. With one T40 on one vessel, Barge Master can service 15 platforms, saving tens of millions of dollars in crane installation and maintenance costs.

The system has a small footprint allowing any vessel to easily accommodate the motion compensated crane. It allows safe transfer of cargo or personnel, fully compensated up to significant wave height of 3 meters. The Barge Master T40 sold to Royal Wagenborg for a ten-year NAM/Shell charter for maintaining gas platforms in the North Sea, works in wave heights up to Hs 3m. Their first year was a great success, significant cost reductions were realized due to high workability and increase of production. The BM-T40 delivers on its promise, and therefor platform cranes and jack-ups are becoming obsolete.

‘We would like to thank all members of the Spotlight Award Committee for granting us with such an important award! The acknowledgement for our next generation motion compensation equipment means a great deal to all of us at Barge Master. Thank you so much!’, Koppert says. ‘And of course we invite everyone to visit our booth to see how our systems work during offshore operations’, he concludes.

The industry is stripping down satellite platforms of all extraneous equipment and personnel, and moving all vital systems and equipment to one central platform.

Bargemaster BM-T40

May says that in the future, most platforms will not have a helicopter deck and a crane. The T40 can be installed on any ship.

For more information watch the documentary below.

 


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