Subsea Rock Installation, or SRI, is a proven technique for the protection and stabilisation of offshore structures. Typically fallpipe vessels are used to install the rock in water depths up to 2,200 meters.
Van Oord’s flexible fallpipe vessel Stornes has recently set the world record while performing the subsea rock installation works, executed in relation to the development of the Aasta Hansteen gas field and Polarled pipeline in the Norwegian Sea.
The Stornes was built at the CIMC Raffles yard in Yantai, China, where it was launched on 20 August 2010 and christened at the Wilhelmina dock in Rotterdam on September 24, 2014.
The name of the new vessel, Stornes, is in keeping with the tradition of flexible fallpipe vessels in the Van Oord fleet (Tertnes, Nordnes). Nes is an ancient word for a peninsula in both Dutch and Norwegian. Stor is the Norwegian word for large. ‘Stornes’ therefore means ‘large peninsula’.