Admiralty to build arctic shuttle tanker

Aker Arctic Technology Inc of Finland and the St. Petersburg based FSUE Admiralty shipyards have signed a contract for a licence and design including classification package of two 70.000 DWT double-acting Arctic shuttle tankers. These will be built for ZAO Sevmorneftegaz for the Prirazlomnoye oil field in the Arctic Ocean. The ships are the largest tankers so far built by the yard and will be delivered, respectively, towards the end of 2007 and 2008.

The tankers are capable of worldwide operations, but are specifically intended to operate independently between the offshore oil production platform and a transshipment terminal in the Murmansk area. The tankers will fly the Russian flag and will be built to Russian regulations, including ice class LU6. It will also have a dynamic positioning system, a helideck and a bow loading facility for the Arctic conditions.

“The Admiralty shipyard contract for Sevmorneftegaz, a subsidiary of Rosneft and Gazprom, is a breakthrough for our double acting concept in Arctic oil transports and a result of our long term co-operation efforts in Russia”, comments Mikko Niini, Managing Director of Aker Arctic Technology of Finland, a member in the Aker Yards group. “This new concept has lowered the transport costs in harsh environments and we believe this example will be thoroughly monitored by the whole oil industry. With our design capabilities and licence co-operation policy several new cases are to be expected both for Russian and Canadian developments and not only for oil but for LNG transports as well.”

The tankers will have an overall length of 260 metres, breadth of 34 m and draft of 13.6 m. The diesel-electric power plant consists of four main diesels providing 25 MW total power. The propulsion is arranged by twin-podded propulsors, each 8.5 MW.