World’s largest ship arrives in Rotterdam

JANUARY 9, 2014 — The world’s largest ship, the 328 m x 124 m Pieter Schelte, arrived in Rotterdam yesterday. It will spend the next four months in in the inner lake of Maasvlakte 2 where it is being fitted with its main mission equipment ready for final testing before becoming operational.

Owned by Dutch-Swiss offshore company Allseas, the giant platform installation decommissioning and pipelay vessel was built at Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering’s Okpo Shipyard in South Korea.

Work in Rotterdam will  include fitting 65-m long support beams to the ship. Including this work, the spin-off of the total construction of the vessel for Dutch business is estimated at €700 million and involves 440 different Dutch companies.

So, which is larger, the Pieter Schelte, or Shell’s Prelude FLNG, billed not as a ship, since it is not self-propelled, but as the world’s largest floating object?

Including its tilting lift beam and stinger, Pieter Schelte’s length is 477 m. That’s shorter than the Prelude FLNG’s 488 m. However with a beam of a mere 74 m, Prelude will be comparatively skinny compared with the 124 m wide Peter Schelte.

Prelude will have a  displacement of  around 600,000 t.  According to Deltamarin, which was involved in the design work, Pieter Schelte will have a transit displacement of 365,000 t and a full load displacement  of 932,000 t.

In November 2013 Allseas announced plans to build a second single-lift vessel larger than Pieter Schelte, to be delivered in 2020. It is intended for installation and removal of the very largest existing platforms.