Massive spar arrives in Gulf of Mexico

JUNE 19, 2013—Dockwise’s heavylift ship Mighty Servant I recently offloaded the 23,000-ton Lucius spar at Ingelside, TX, following a 7,700 nautical mile journey from Pori, Finland.

Measuring 605 feet long and 110 feet in diameter, the Lucis Truss Spar was loaded onto the Mighty Servant 1 by means of skid from the Technip yard in Pori, Finland. The spar will be operated by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Houston, TX, at the deepwater Lucius Development located in Keathley Canyon Block 875 in the Gulf of Mexico.

Back in 2011, Paris-based Technip was awarded a contract by Anadarko for the engineering, construction and transport of the Lucius Truss Spar.

The Lucius Truss Spar floating production facility will have a nameplate capacity of 80,000 barrels of oil per day and 450 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. The first oil from Lucius is expected in 2014. It is estimated to have resources of more than 300 million barrel of oil equivalents.

The Lucius production unit is jointly owned by Anadarko (35%), Plains E&P (23.3%) ExxonMobil (15%) Apache (11.7%), Petrobras (9.6%) and Eni (5.4%).

Engineers at Dockwise, which was acquired by Boskalis back in March, had to think of out of the box when offloading the Lucius Truss Spar because of the restricted clearance space at Ingleside. Normally, the spar would have been offloaded at the stern, but instead was unloaded over the side necessitating the design and installation of new buoyancy tanks.

The massive spar reached the Mighty Servant 1’s carrying capacity limit and extended about 130 feet over the stern of the vessel.