Mammoet has supported the construction of a propane dehydration plant (PDH) in Jubail Industrial City, Saudi Arabia, handling all the critical components.
Samsung Engineering for Advanced Polyolefins Company (APOC) is developing the project in Saudi Arabia and according to Mammoet, the plant will be the largest of its type in the world. The heavy transport specialist was tasked with ensuring the cargoes arrived at the site in the right sequence and installed smoothly, minimising port charges and reducing onsite congestion.
The company took charge of the full scope of factory-to-foundation logistics, covering the marine and land transport and heavy lift requirements. This included handling 15 vast pipe rack modules – measuring up to 46 m long, 33 m high and weighing up to 1,900 tonnes – from a fabrication facility in the UAE to Saudi Arabia.
Mammoet organised six consecutive voyages and utilised its nearby yard as a laydown facility to facilitate the movements. The in-kingdom transportation process, meanwhile, included both imported and locally built components, as well as the plant’s central process tower, or product splitter. To negotiate the 26-km route from the quayside and the laydown facility to the project site, Mammoet performed complex route simulations, determined where and how the road network would need to be modified and strengthened, and managed all permitting processes with the Saudi authorities.
A large fleet of transport equipment – including 180 axle lines of SPMTs, 60 conventional axles, and eight prime movers – were put to work to deliver the components.
Among the 125 separate heavy lift operations, Mammoet said that erecting the 129 m-tall, 10 m-wide, 1,600-tonne product splitter was the most challenging. The heavy lift specialist called upon a tower gantry lifting system and a 1,250-tonne capacity crawler crane for the work. The CC6800 crawler crane handled the tail, keeping it clear of the ground throughout the lift, while the gantry’s hydraulic lifting system hoisted the product splitter from the top.
Unlike most gantry lifting systems, Mammoet’s is entirely freestanding and requires no guy wires. This means the footprint is kept to an absolute minimum, which is an important consideration on a busy and congested site like this one.
Throughout the project, Mammoet had to contend with unexpected challenges, including delays in module fabrication and design modifications in the UAE, which required replanning and handling larger than anticipated modules. In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, maintenance of bridges along the transport route threatened to delay the project by up to two months. However, Mammoet instead decided to deploy temporary bridging systems to keep the schedule on track.
