Vyborg Shipyard

Capabilities and Ambitions

Vyborg Shipyard JSC is one of the largest shipbuilding companies in the North-Western Region of Russia, with over 50 years experience in shipbuilding.

The company is located in Vyborg, on the North side of the Gulf of Finland, about 50 km from the Finnish border and 130 km from St. Petersburg. Its strategic location between two big harbours in Vysotsk and Vyborg, proximity to ports in Helsinki and St. Petersburg and to international sea roads make it attractive for ship repair. The company employs over 1,500 qualified workers and engineers certified to international standards, aimed at finding efficient, innovative and customer-oriented solutions enabling the shipyard to provide utmost professional service to their customers.

Since the Shipyard was founded in 1948, and until the early 1980s, it was mainly involved in the construction of medium-weight transport vessels in series of 8-10 units per year, with launch facilities restrictions of 140m in length and 18m in width. Since 1980, the shipyard has been renovated and reoriented for the construction of SSFDRs (Semi-Submersible Floating Drilling Rigs) and Jack-ups with an estimated building rate of one or two units of floating offshore drilling rigs a year. Since then, the shipyard has built four units of SSFDR and two units for open seas.

At the initial stage of building offshore facilities, Vyborg Shipyard supplied Astrakhan shipyards with 900t block-modules and pontoons for six semi-submersible drilling rigs, to be finally assembled in Astrakhan and used in the Caspian Sea.

Further, for the Joint Venture Vietsovpetro, Vyborg delivered seven sets of topside modules for stationary drilling platforms.

Proving high reliability

In the mid-1990’s, Vyborg Shipyard performed a modernisation of two semi-submersible drilling platforms for operation in the Atlantic sea, at depths up to 2,000m. For extending columns and pontoons of the platforms, a unique lifting operation was performed with the rise of the entire platform while afloat. This operation was carried out for the first time in the country.

It is worth mentioning that all of the SSFDRs and jack-ups ever built by Vyborg for foreign partners are currently being exploited by oil and gas companies, having proved their high reliability.

As a result of our long-term and close cooperation with Moss Maritime AS (Norway), a multi-purpose bare deck platform Moss CS-50 was built. Platform CS-50 is a fifth generation of semi-submersible platforms; its bare deck is strong enough to accommodate a topside structure with the weight up to 20,000t. While building this platform, Vyborg mastered unique construction and welding technologies for brand-new in the country, never previously used types of steel. A new welding technology using preheating has been developed and applied.

The hull weight of this bare deck SSFDR, delivered to Moss Maritime in May 2002, amounted to about 15,000 tonnes—with construction carried out in only 18 months.

Further to its Norwegian customers, Vyborg has so far built six outfitted hulls of vessels for supplying and maintenance of drilling platforms. The time of construction for such a vessel is 8-10 months with the subsequent 3-4 months required for the completion at a customer’s shipyard.

The construction of outfitted vessels’ hulls is an on-going project. Thus, for the unique world offshore ice-resistant stationary platform Prirazlomnaya, the shipyard produced a power distribution module with total weight of about 3,000 tonnes, which was delivered to Sevmash in May 2006. The construction of this module was conducted on the leased special barge UR-93, which then was towed with the module to Severodvinsk. For Prirazlomnaya, Vyborg has recently completed the construction of an accommodation block module weighing about 3,000 tonnes.

For another big customer, Lukoil-Kaliningrad, Vyborg produced and delivered 7,000t of preassembled sections of the single point mooring for tanker loading at the Varandei field.

Over the last five years, Vyborg JSC has been concentrating its efforts on offshore projects, constantly taking part in various tenders (often together with its foreign partners) to act as a subcontractor for a number of ambitious shelf development projects.

Vyborg’s efforts pay off

And the efforts have duly paid off: in March 2007, a contract was signed with a Swiss company (Sea Horse Ventures) to build a platform similar to CS-50. However, in this case, the amount of hull structures was increased with additional elements; such as a cantilever with an accommodation block (two tiers), technological block and a drill floor. Also, the amount of the installed equipment increased—bringing the total weight of the SSFDR hull to 18,700t. Although in accordance with the contract the delivery period was set for March 2009, Vyborg shipyard, prompted by the customer’s wants, managed to attract additional funds and complete the construction before the deadline on December 20 2008—three months before the contractual deadline.

It is safe to say that Vyborg Shipyard has mastered the technology of building SSFDRs, and has accumulated the experience of working with cold-resistant steels. That, as well as the fact that it possesses unique production facilities by Russian standards, allows the company to build SSFDRs in an astonishingly short time.

As an example, in the times of the “planned economy” of the former Soviet Union, the construction of a SSFDR unit would typically take between 43-45 months, whereas in 2002, a bare deck SSFDR was built in just 17 months—proving that it is now possible to fully build a SSFDR in 36 months. However, these timescales could only be met on the condition of a timely delivery of all main components. Thus, if during certain times almost all equipment was manufactured locally, the current situation would be completely different—and the vast majority of the equipment is now imported. The boom of shelf-development construction has led to a drastic shortage of capital equipment; as a result, suppliers not only dramatically increased the prices of their products, but also extended the terms of their delivery. This is especially true for drilling equipment, high-power diesel generators and thrusters. Therefore, it is the terms of delivery of capital equipment currently that now define projected SSFDR delivery times. The company is very pleased to have developed very close partnerships with our trusted and reliable suppliers who help us deliver projects on time.

In November 2007, Vyborg Shipyard won a tender and signed a contract with Gazflot LLC for the engineering, construction and delivery of two SSFDRs to be used in the Arctic seas. The project of the platform MOSS CS-50 was once again chosen as a basic design.

The delivery on this contract is due in late 2010 and in March 2011. In order to speed up the construction process, it was decided to manufacture the lower hull at Vyborg Shipyard and the topside structure at Samsung Heavy Industries Company’s SHI shipyard in Korea. For the first time in the history of Russia’s shipbuilding, the integration of the lower hull and topside industry will be carried out in Murmansk by the Russian contractors with some assistance of their foreign counterparts.

At the present time, Vyborg has already completed the assembly of two sections of the pontoons with the columns put into a single unit with installation of horizontal bracings of the first of Gazflot’s SSFDR. Currently in progress is internal work in pontoons and columns—including assembly and systems and mechanism tests—in order to insure a smooth transportation of the module to the Murmansk area for further integration with the topside module (which will be coming from Korea).

Simultaneously, pontoons with columns for the second SSFDR for Gazflot are now being assembled into a single module with transportation to the site of integration with the top unit (also transported from Korea) due in early 2011.

Together with the Dutch company Dockwise, Vyborg works on finding solutions for all possible issues of these demanding operations. The Krylov Shipbuilding Research Institute has been taking a very proactive role in the engineering parts of this project.

Moving forward

One of the major mid-term goals of Vyborg Shipyard involves a number of modernisation activities, developed to increase production capacity and reduce labour content of the production process.

As the first priority, Vyborg sees the need to develop measures to increase the capacities of its launching facilities. So far, during the construction of tanker DWT 12,000 tonnes with a length of 149m (exceeding the size of the existing floating-out basin) the company was forced to launch the vessels in two parts with the ensuing afloat docking with the help of a floating crane (lifting capacity of 300t). On the 21st of June 2007, the Vyborg shipyard launched its first vessel with the width of 20 m. The hull of the ROV vessel, for servicing underwater pipelines, was assembled on a barge, which was then floated to the deep-sea area there the vessel was launched. Traditionally, such operations in the country were held only with the use of a floating dock. Mastering this technology will allow Vyborg to build vessels of any length and width needed for the development of such difficult fields as Shtokman.

The company also plans to upgrade the hull production complex in order to reduce labour.

The company plans to not limit themselves with the implementation of individual, albeit challenging, tasks, but also understands the importance of the Federal-level Shelf development projects. Shareholders of Vyborg Shipyard recently decided to participate in a tender announced by the Russian Federal Energy Ministry. The investment project named “Creation of modern shipbuilding complex with a dry dock in the Western region of Russia” implies the development of a new shipyard in the area adjacent to the deep waters of port Primorsk, Leningrad County. The shipyard will be built using a modern underlying technology that provides reduced labour content of the manufacturing process thus ensuring shorter construction timescale. The yard will be provided with a building-launching complex with a closed dry dock. Planned dimensions of the dock are approximately 400m by 85m by16.5m, equipped by crane equipment that will allow for installation of large blocks weighing up to 1,600 tons.

In order to reduce the time of construction of a SSDP unit, a special “heavy zone” is created on the premises of the shipyard, with a reinforced embankment to allow the assembly of the SSFDR topsides, top modules for fixed production platforms and jack-ups. Having taken into consideration the experience of foreign shipyards, the extensive use of contracted supplies of hulls modules form the other shipyards is envisaged.

The estimated production capacities will allow the construction of Semi-Submersible Drilling Rigs; Oil Rigs; Tankers DWT up to 160,000 tons; Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) and Floating-Point Units (FPU), as well as Gas carriers with a capacity of up to 250,000 m3.

Such a shipyard would consistently meet the needs of Gazprom and other customers in their oil and gas exploration and production projects. Provided the question of financing is resolved, this project could be in operation by the end of 2010.

For the time being, Vyborg Shipyard is proud to offer its production capacities for construction and modernisation of semi-submersible and jack-up drilling rigs; range of offshore vessels; tankers; vessels for emergency and deep-sea operations and other projects of high technical complexity.

www.vyborgshipyard.ru

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