Page 17: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (January 2017)

rdent reports that its big- rector. sectioned the hull.” tine and subsequently lifted these from gest wreck removal of the “We had to apply ingenuity to use our The Ardent salvage team cut the deck the seabed with the Conquest MB-1 past year allowed it to dem- chain cutting techniques on the deck house into six pieces with Ardent Chain crane barge. The project to remove that

Aonstrate an innovative new house in a less than conventional meth- Pullers, and the vessel’s hull into 31 jack-up was completed in November, cutting technology designed to make od, and the Ardent Guided Guillotine pieces with the Ardent Guided Guillo- 2016.

operations more safe and ef? cient. This speci? c project centered on a collapsed jack-up which needed to be removed from the Mexican seabed, a salvage in close proximity to a well head platform.

Weighing approximately 7,000 tons, the jack-up Troll Solution, contracted to operate in Pemex’s Abkatun-Pol-Chuc shallow water oil ? eld, experienced a debilitating accident while carrying out maintenance work on the wellhead plat- form CAAN-A in May 2015.

The offshore rig was positioning itself to carry out maintenance on wells linked to the Caan Alf platform in the southern

Bay of Campeche when it listed, killing two workers.

Initial efforts were made to re? oat and salvage the jack-up, though the Troll So- lution collapsed and sank into the seabed in approximately 30 meters water depth, coming to rest within two meters from the active CAAN-A platform.

Ardent was called in for the job, de- ploying assets from several countries, including the Conquest MB-1 crane barge, and a 1,000-ton hydraulic wreck grab from the Netherlands, as well as support vessels deployed from the U.S. and Mexico.

Conquest MB-1 has a of 1,400 tons lifting capacity, which notably had been used under Titan (Ardent’s premerger company) on the infamous Costa Con- cordia cruise ship wreck removal off of

Italy.

Cool Cutting

The operation to remove the jack-up

Troll Solution utilized Ardent’s newly designed Guided Guillotine to dismem- ber the jack-up, instead of cutting with

Innovation that shapes tomorrow more conventional methods.

Ardent naval architect Roland De

Marco explains: “Traditional methods

Marine Jet Power is a leading supplier of require either a push or pull-cut with waterjet propulsion for small craft and larger chains or diamond wire. Pull-cuts re- ships – the ?rst in duplex steel mixed ?ow jets.

quire tunnels to be bored into the seabed, whereas push-cuts require a large frame- work to be built around. “The main hurdles to overcome were, how to best cut the jack-up into sections without fabricating an elaborate struc- ture, and boring holes underneath the jack-up through the seabed was improb- marinejetpower.com able due to obstructions,” said Shelby

Harris, Ardent Americas operations di- www.marinelink.com 17

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