As the major engineering partner to the Allseas Group, Bosch Rexroth has developed a drive and control system for the world’s largest mobile lifting mechanism for offshore installations. The special vessel equipped with this topside lifting system (TLS) known as ‘Pieter Schelte’, can lift and transport topsides of offshore platforms with a weight of up to 48,000 tons, all in one piece. This Allseas solution therefore considerably lowers the cost and risk of offshore assembly and disassembly. Pieter Schelte is currently being built in South Korea and will be ready for use in early 2014.
To disassemble topsides of offshore platforms, workers would traditionally have to manually disassemble the structure into individual parts whilst at sea – work that is both time consuming and hazardous. The new vessel from the Allseas Group will completely lift the platforms from their steel ‘jacket’ and transport them onto land, making disassembly much safer and cost-effective.
