Shaping the world Jan De Nul

SHAPING THE WORLD

Operating worldwide, the Jan De Nul Group specialises in dredging and reclamation, rock placing, trenching, rock dumping for oil & gas related offshore pipeline projects, quay walls, marine related projects, civil engineering and large-scale environmental remediation projects. Felicity Landon reports on some of its latest projects.

With a solid reputation for highly complex turnkey projects, employing more than 6,300 people and with an annual turnover of €1.8 billion, Jan De Nul is a world-leading contractor in dredging and marine engineering projects. Yet this Belgium and Luxembourg based company still retains its identity as a family business – the De Nul family started out in the early 20th century as a civil engineering company, and De Nul undertook his first dredging project in 1951.

Today the company has three main business units – dredging projects (including rock installation and offshore works), civil engineering and environmental activities. Thanks to some huge and continuing investments in personnel and material, Jan De Nul Group owns the most modern and technologically advanced dredging fleet in the world.

Having invested more than €2 billion on 27 new vessels between 2007 and 2011, the company decided to add three more vessels to its fleet –including two trailing suction hopper dredgers, the Pedro Alvares Cabral and the Bartolomeu Dias, each with a hopper capacity of 14,000 cu m, and the fallpipe and mining vessel Joseph Plateau, all launched during 2012.

At the end of 2012, Jan De Nul ordered a 5,400 tonnes capacity cable turntable, for the vessel Willem de Vlamingh, which has been outfitted for cable laying offshore, ready for a major contract to connect the Northwind offshore wind farm, off Ostend, to the Belgian power grid. The cable turntable

was ordered from offshore handling systems specialist Caley Ocean Systems, which also supplied a modular loading tower assembly.

Worldwide contracts

During 2012 and 2013, Jan De Nul has continued to win contracts for a series of enormous projects around the world. New sites with a total value of more than €500 million were added to the order book in just one month recently. The largest contract was for Chevron’s Wheatstone pipeline on the west coast of Australia. Before installing the pipeline, trenches had to be dredged in the hard sea bed and, in order to protect the pipeline, it will then have to be covered with sand and rocks after installation. In addition, pre-lay rock berms have had to be installed, enabling the new pipeline to cross existing pipelines.

In Canada, Jan De Nul’s trailing suction dredger Cristóbal Colón , the largest dredger in the world, was contracted to dredge a glory hole in the Atlantic Ocean, east of Newfoundland. The glory hole, which will protect subsea oil installations from icebergs, had to be dredged at a water depth of 130 metres;

the Cristóbal Colón is the only dredger able to dredge to a depth of 155 metres.

Jan De Nul’s expertise is in demand in some of the harshest offshore environments in the world, off Siberia and in the Barents Sea. In Siberia, the fallpipe vessel Simon Stevin installed umbilicals for Gazprom at 90 metres water depth at the island of Sakhalin. These umbilicals will control the gas field manifolds from land. Also off Sakhalin, the cutter suction dredger Fernão de Magelhães was contracted to dredge an access channel for Exxon. In the Tatar Strait between Siberia and Sakhalin, the rock dumping vessels La Boudeuse and Willem de Vlamingh carried out rock dumping works to protect a subsea pipeline from ice floes crossing the strait. The pipeline guarantees the connection of the gas fields east of Sakhalin with the mainland. Further north, Jan De Nul carried dredging and rock dumping works to protect pipelines transporting gas from the Jamal Peninsula, in the Barents Sea, to Western Europe.

Onshore work

Onshore civil engineering works are also keeping Jan De Nul busy. Early this year (2013), the consortium Via Brugge, consisting of Ondernemingen Jan De Nul, Algemene Aannemingen Van Laere, Franki Construct, Aswebo, Aclagro

and DG Infra+ was selected as the preferred bidder by Via-Invest for the private/public partnership project A11 Bruges. This is one of the six major ‘missing links’ in the Flemish road network and the largest design-build-financemaintain road project in Flanders to date. It consists of the construction of 12 kms of the A11 between two regional roads, the N49 and the N31, and includes a 30-year maintenance period. The new motorway will establish a smooth link between the Port of Zeebrugge and its hinterland; by separating port traffic from local traffic, the project will improve road safety and quality of life in the region.

Headline project

Other projects are ongoing across the company’s various disciplines throughout the world. In dredging and marine works, for example, projects include capital dredging for a new shipyard in Brazil, modernisation of the Callao multipurpose terminal in Peru, dredging the access channel for Sittwe Port in Myanmar, similar work for the Port of Pointe-Noire in Congo, pre-trenching and mechanical backfilling for the Zawitka pipeline in Myanmar, and hydraulic sand supply for a coal fired power plant in Malaysia.

However, perhaps the real ‘headline’ project is in Panama, where Jan De Nul has a contract running from 2009 to 2014 for the design and construction of the third set of locks for the Panama Canal. This massive project includes the design and construction of the Atlantic Locks Complex (three post-panamax locks) and the Pacific Locks Complex (three post-panamax locks and three dams) and involves the dry excavation of 40 million cu m of material, 20 million cu m of backfill, 10 million cu m of dredging, 5 million cu m of reinforced concrete, 200,000 tonnes of reinforcement steel and 16 lock gates with total weight of 45,000 tonnes. It’s a project that, when complete, will have a huge impact on ship size and global trade routes – yet another massive project by Jan De Nul which is shaping the way we live and work around the world. n