Offshore Crane Exchange - GDF L10-A, North Sea

Unconventional methods used to solve common challenges.

GDF Suez E&P Netherlands needed to remove two diesel-driven cranes from their L10-AP platform and replace one of them with a new crane. They contracted Conbit to look for options for this job and provide the best structural design and procedures solution.

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Watch how we prepare and execute

By Conbit employees engineered lifting solution

The platform and solution

The GDF Suez E&P Netherlands’ gas production platform, designated as L10-AP, is located in the Dutch sector of the North Sea. It is one of the platforms of the L10-A offshore facility.

Conbit’s solution is to use a tower crane to decommission the existing deck cranes and install a new deck crane. With the new deck crane, they could demobilize the tower crane.

Cost advantage

Conbit proposed a solution to erect a temporary tower crane for disassembling the two existing deck cranes and installing the new deck crane. The new deck crane would be used to dismantle the tower crane. Using a temporary crane in this way offers a significant cost advantage over the alternative method of using a crane vessel. This is because such a vessel is much more expensive to rent than a temporary crane.

Tower crane and new crane

The temporary crane used to remove the existing deck cranes was installed on a special base structure mounted to the platform framing. Conbit developed the structural design of this base structure.

The replacement crane (KENZ) had a different size and height than the original crane. To accommodate these differences, the Conbit team revised the crane boom rest and maintenance platform. They performed the structural analysis of the crane boom rest and its maintenance platform, including detailed calculations.

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