Pioneering Spirit: The Largest Construction Ship in the World

no mega project on planet Earth is built without a reason whether it's a building meant to inspire the masses and bring Pride to a nation as it rise is taller than any other on Earth an aircraft finally tuned to fly on the edge of space now run anything that might pursue it or a glamorous gy plan City meant to stroke the ego of whatever dictator foots the bill Humanity we don't build just for the sake of building so if there is a record to be broken if there is a human achievement that can yet be surpassed there's going to have to be a reason compelling enough to make it happen and on today's episode of Mega projects we're going to introduce a one such record-breaking Beast a behemoth that holds the distinction of being the biggest heaviest vehicle ever made it's not a bulldozzer that can bring down mountains it's not a gargantuan battle tank that lets its Nation win Wars just by speaking its name and it's not an aircraft it's not a rocket not even a space station it's a ship that is so gigantic so utterly massive that when it cuts through the water there is truly nothing that can compare and while it does exist why did Humanity Endeavor to build such a record-breaking machine and the answer dear viewer is oil and the creation in question is the pioneering spirit [Music] in order to understand the mega project that is pioneering Spirit we first have to understand another of Humanity's Creations one that is as important to our modern world as it is routinely forgotten or overlooked and that would be the oil rig or as it's better understood the offshore oil production platform oil rigs are not the prettiest pieces of construction in the world and not by a long shot they're hulking expanses of steel concrete and very little else usually with cranes hanging off the side but they're important nonetheless dredging up immense amount of off oil without which a good proportion of human machinery would just grind to a halt there are a few kinds of O rigs some that rest on pillars that connect all the way to the seabed some that float and anchored to the seabed with moing lines and some attached to slender towers that can stretch and bend back and forth with the currents of the sea now I'm not going to get into the details on how exactly they work but in order to understand their relationship to the pioneering Spirit we only need to understand one other thing about them which is that they are a nightmare to build and assemble on the open ocean if you're going to create such a thing out in the middle of nowhere you've got to transport all the materials all the people all the construction equipment and all the other crap that you need out to basically the middle of nowhere and support an operation for months or even years until this great big thing can be constructed but all the way back in the mid 1980s the technical director of a company called all's had an idea all's is a Swiss company that had been founded just recently working with undersea oil pipelines but the idea that the company had was related to a problem that existed above the surface of the water wouldn't it be nice all SE thought if companies could construct their or rigs while still on land and then put the entire fully built hunk of metal onto a ship steam out to the middle of the ocean and simply plop down the oil rig wherever it needed to go it would be way more convenient for everybody and even the highest price tag a company like all's could conceive of would still be a hell of a lot better than the cost of an oil company trying to build their rig in the usual way in 1987 Al L claimed the idea and pledged publicly that one day they would build it and then well they sat on the idea for 20 years and went and did some other stuff but even the designs that all's had on paper were pretty impressive and every so often a new group of technical Engineers would take a look at the plans and make some tweaks and they knew the thing would have to be truly huge in order to hold the all rigs They Carried and to literally have enough space for them on board at first that envisions building a gigantic catamaran star ship taking two massive super tankers connected together across part of the twin hulls while leaving a large slot in between them near the forward half of the ship the bow where it could pull up to a platform and put down the oil rig while a complex system of ballast would keep the entire apparatus from capsizing while it held a several thousand ton rig out on the end of a crane around 2004 the plan changed from joining together two super tanks aners to building a single huge catamaran hole from scratch so that they could include some Advanced bells and whistles that would make the whole thing work a lot better then in 2007 alies announced that they were ready to take the leap they were going to build their great ship a twin H platform that could install and remove entire oil rigs in one go their creation would be capable of incredible Feats of Strength with the lifting system at the bar the ship capable of lifting 48,000 metric tons of weight and the lift system at the stern capable of picking up another 25,000 metric tons the ship would also be able to lay undersea pipe in keeping with all se's primary emission and it would perform that task at depths of up to 13,000 ft below the surface of the ocean it will be named the Peta schelz after the father of all's owner a man named Edward harima except actually it wouldn't because it turns out that the real life P Schult had very much been a bit of a Nazi serving in the wanes during World War II a name change in February 2015 would give the ship its more enduring Monica the pioneering spirit and by then the thing was in the water after a several year-long assembly process joined by South Korean ship building GI deu that's Hana ocean today the ship was deemed ready to set sail by late 2014 in November of that year it departed from South Korea and two months later it arrived in Rotterdam to be commissioned its lift system was installed it passed all its final checks and in August 2016 the pioneering Spirit set sail on the job for the very first time even among its own category of global suers ships the pioneering spirit is something to behold from tip to tail if you will it measured a full length of 477 M or 1,565 ft with its beams extended when measuring just the ship itself it's the third longest ship in the world after only the seawise JS and the Emma Merk it claims a breadth of 124 M that's 47 ft at the parts of the structure in which the two catamaran holes join together while the catamarans themselves are each a little over 30 m or about 100 ft wide the pioneering Spirits Central slot measures 122 M long by 59 M wide or 400 by 194 ft making it more than able to service most of the world's oil rigs as we said previously the ship's topside lift capacity is a full 48,000 metric tons that's 22 times the weight of the London Eye 200 times that of the Statue of Liberty almost five times the weight of the I4 Tower or if you really like real units of measurement that's 32 6,496 shailo Neals a maximum draft the ship displaces a full million tons of water making it the heaviest or highest displacement vehicle ever created that's 19 times the displacement of the Titanic by the way and nearly 10 times that of the Gerald R Ford class aircraft carrier despite its incredible size the pioneering spirit is a mover when it wants to be from port to port it can hit a maximum speed of 140 knots when at its Transit weight that's 60 MPH or 20 6 km an hour with a maximum draft of 27 M and a minimum draft of 10 m it's both too deep in the water and too wide around the midsection to scree through waterways like the Suez Canal or the St Lawrence Seaway and if faced with the prospect of making it through the Panama Canal both the crew of the pioneering Spirit and the Panamanian government would probably have a collective nervous breakdown but powered by 13 Rolls-Royce diesel electric Asma thrusters with 360° rotation it's got more than enough power to get itself to any place where it can fit without scraping the seabed and if you're wondering about its price tag well it's 2.4 billion Beyond its physical dimensions the pioneering spirit is impressive for other reasons too it can support a full crew of up to 571 people sleeping two to a cabin with more than enough hands on deck to participate in complex oil rig installation and pip playing operations Crews typically hail from over 20 different nationalities comprising three teams a marine crew a construction crew and an engineering crew the people on board live and work there for 5 weeks of time performing 12-hour shifts and they enjoy a laundry catered food a bar a gym and a karaoke room according to allies the average crew member will walk up to 20 km a day aboard the ship even before they arrive at the gym in their off hours the ship doesn't ever actually shut off owing to just how difficult and energy intensive it is to get the entire thing roaring back to life after it goes offline and even while it's import it requires dozens of people to be on board at any given moment the ship's onboard navigation system allows it to construct a 360° radar constructed view around the ship and it carries a high Precision acoustic positioning system and other underwater systems to allow it to keep a highly precise view of the seabed it can become semi- submersible sort of squatting itself down into the water while straddling its intended bayad inside its slot and offloading massive amounts of ballast in order to lift and transport weight onto its Port beams the ship is equipped with an immensely powerful onboard lift system able to pick up a full capacity payload a couple of meters off the ground or the level of the water and it's I with several other large cranes including one called a Shear leg which allows it to lift the welded steel jacket structure that affixes shallow all rigs to the seaf Flor it's got a pipe laying system called the Stinger that guides pipes to the bottom of the ocean and it's backed up by two barges designed to support it The Iron Lady measures 200x 57 M or 656 by 187 ft and can carry heavy structures into shallower Waters and the pioneering Spirit would run while the aptly named Bumblebee stores and carries around the Stinger apparatus when it's not being used it's equipped with a helipad that can host Choppers as big as a sori s92 and it can carry yet another 27,000 tons of undersea pipe on board if anybody can figure out what to do with 27,000 tons of [Music] pipe the pioneering Spirit performed its first reall Life Lift as a working ship on August the 22nd 2016 on that dat the ship performed its funky deadlift on a 13,500 ton offshore oil rig in Norwegian Coastal Waters s of the North Sea the lift didn't go perfectly the pioneering Spirit collided with part of the platform during the operation but the platform was going to be removed anyway and the ship was mostly fine so don't worry about it once lifted the pioneering Spirit carried the thing all the way to Lut landlet in Norway where it was dropped off for dismantling on Shore a few months later the pioneering Spirit performed another North Sea removal getting rid of the iconic three-legged Brent Delta platform off the coast of Shetland the ship lifted the 24,000 ton platform off of its support structure in the span of seconds setting a world record as it did so and even that only strained the pioneering Spirit to about half of its overall lifting capacity in the following years the ship has performed all manner of oil rig installations and extractions mostly in and around the North Sea but also off the coast of France in the Baltic and black seas and off the coast of Africa in 2019 the pioneering Spirit performed what was at the time among the heaviest offshore lifts in history on a 26,000 ton rig that's part of Norway's Yohan Sparr oil field it also performed its lightest lift to date in that same year on a measley 3,800 ton accommodation platform it's worked on the nordstream and turkstream pipelines and of course it's posed for quite a few lovely photographs for all of us to be nerdy about but that's not all that the allseas company can Envision pionering spirit's future with a new Global focus on offshore wind power production the ship is an ideal mechanism to install Next Generation wind turbines which are incredibly heavy and too big for most ships to handle pioneering Spirit can handle the complex tasks of trans transportation and installation that go far beyond the capabilities of most vessels and until anybody else builds something of a comparable size it'll be able to pick up quite a few contracts in a market consisting exclusively of itself not only that but the ship size insulates it from the harsh weather conditions that so interrupt turbine installation and it can handle more jobs at a faster clip than installation campaigns that use other mechanisms to do the job in broader terms the pioneering spirit will be at the Forefront of the global transition away from fossil fuels and toward Renewables as the highest capacity oil rig removal vessel in the world it'll be responsible for undoing the decades worth of installation and construction work that allowed Global oil companies to run their offshore industry in the first place so that's the pioneering Spirit one of the biggest ships in history the true recordbreaker and the only vessel on planet Earth that can do what it does best at the time of writing the pioneering spirit is sitting in the port of rdam in the Netherlands after having finished its most recent job off the coast morania and Sagal there it was laying pipe for an deep water liquefied natural gas project at depths of up to 2700 M below the surface of the ocean it plans for our next Voyage have not yet been announced but by the time you're seeing this episode we'd be willing to bet that it's already steaming off to yet another oil platform in need of a helping hand and finally there's the question of succession and identifying the next vessel that will take pioneering spirit's place in the record books since 2018 all's has referenced plans to build an even bigger vessel one that will allow the company to get in on the long and very expensive process of dismantling and removing the world's largest or rigs its name the Amazing Grace and at a price tag of about $3 billion it'll essentially be a bigger bad rendition of pioneering Spirit when fully built according to the Al's then CEO it would feature a lift capacity of 72,000 metric tons one and a half times that of the pioneering Spirit but as of now the Amazing Grace is just a plan on paper and it's not likely to be built anytime soon in 2020 the concept was shelved indefinitely and at the time of writing it hasn't yet been resuscitated in it is it appears that the pioneering Spirit Will Remain the most massive ship on the high seas reshaping the world we live in one or rig at a time

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 120,192

Keywords: pioneering spirit largest ship, biggest construction vessel in the world, pioneering spirit largest vessel, largest construction vessel, construction ship pioneering spirit, offshore construction vessel, pioneering spirit, construction vessel pioneering spirit, shipspotting pioneering spirit, largest offshore heavy lift vessel, heavy lift offshore ship pioneering spirit, heavy lift offshore vessel pioneeroing spirit, largest heavy lift offshore vessel, cranevessel, ship, shipping

Id: LTFNg7p_ADY

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2024