Hyundai launches giant heavy lift vessel

Hyundai Heavy Industries Co., Ltd. (HHI), South Korea’s biggest shipbuilder and a leading offshore facilities contractor, today announced its shipbuilding affiliate, Hyundai Samho Heavy Industries, completed a 10,000 ton heavy lift vessel (HVL), Hyundai-10000, at its shipyard in Yeongam, South Korea.

After a series of final tests, the HVL will join HHI’s existing offshore facility-building infrastructure in Ulsan in March and begin operation from April this year. The vessel equipped with 8 double truss jib cranes measures 182 m in length, 70 m in width and 11 m in depth.

With the addition of HLV, HHI’s maximum lifting capacity per module will increase more than six-fold from 1,200 tons to 8,000 tons. With the new HLV, HHI can install bigger modularized blocks built on-ground onto offshore facilities at a time, and therefore minimize the potential risks of working at height.

As the global offshore market has been seeing an increase in the size of facilities, the addition of the mega-sized floating crane can help HHI reduce construction time of a variety of offshore structures the company builds, bringing about 24 billion Korean won ($21.9 million) in cost reduction each year to HHI, the company has said.

Upon delivery, the heavy lift vessel will be used to build 19 offshore projects including Q204 FPSO for BP at HHI’s offshore yard in Ulsan, South Korea.