ALE at Final Stages of One of the World’s Largest Offshore Projects
ALE is approaching the final stages of its load-out operations for the Upper Zakum 750 Island Surface Facilities (UZ750) Project, one of the world’s largest offshore oil field projects based 84km offshore, northwest of Abu Dhabi, UAE. The contractor secured the scope to deliver almost 100 different modules to the north, south, central and west islands of the Zakum oil field, the second largest field in the Arabian Gulf and the fourth largest oil field in the world.
The modules consist of a variety of pipe racks, process modules, buildings and substations, weighing between 120t –4,700t and some modules measuring over 50m long. ALE is contracted to deliver these from various fabrication yards in the Arabian Gulf, to the project site on the artificial Zakum islands. ALE will be using a variety of different techniques, including engineering, weighing, land and marine transportation, load-ins, load-outs and installations. Furthermore, ALE will be utilising a range of transport equipment including weightors, SPMTs, conventional trailers and external/internal ballast systems.
Operations commenced in October 2015 and since then, ALE has delivered all 29 modules offshore to the south island and 38 modules out of 40 for the north island, with the final 26 awaiting delivery for the west island. During this project, that is planned to be ready mid-2017, ALE has used 40 – 252 axle lines of SPMT to perform the transportation and load-out operations, making it one of the largest amount of axle lines ALE has used in one project.
The UZ750 project is currently under construction offshore Abu Dhabi. The project involves the construction of four artificial islands, the central island will house the processing facilities and north, west and south islands will act as satellite platforms. The oil field is set to increase the overall oil production capacity of the UAE by 750,000 barrels of oil per day in 2017, which will be sustainable for 25 years.