[QUOTE=Sweat-n-Grease;92998]seacomber, if the USNS [I]Grasp[/I] experienced the wind and sea state that these tugs experienced, while attempting a tow, would you say it’s fair to believe the Fuel Oil Tank(s) on the USNS [I]Grasp[/I] would take-in considerable amount of water?[/QUOTE]
So far, I haven’t been in that kind of weather while aboard. It is common for us to avoid bad weather based on information from weather reports and recommendations issued by the Navy. If the water does reach those vents tho, I would be more concerned about finding another ship then keeping the engines running because we would be well under water.
Are they equipped with the big box vents with the ball in them? Do the have the Wager style with the half ball the floats up and down on a rod? Do they have the regular ball vents? Had they recently opened the fuel tank for an inspection and the hatch improperly sealed? We all have lots of questions problem is this bunch won’t be forthcoming with many answers. If they sanitized the reports for the anchor dragging incident in Dutch imagine what this report will look like. It is a certainty this will all be laid on the crew but the error chain started when Shell decided to tow this thing during this time of the year. It goes even further back when it appears the command group has no one with local knowledge. If they do have someone with local knowledge then he has obviously been ignored or overruled every step of the way so far.
Thats from Jan 1. Aiviq was in fact in the harbor last night picking up an ETS.
[QUOTE=c.captain;92878]Thanks for reopening the thread Mike
NOW ALL YOU MUGS! Let’s not make him regret his generosity. Don’t make me unsheathe my stick!
so let’s keep discussing AIVIQ’s design for what we would imagine Shell wanted it to perform which was to conduct ice management, set anchors and tow the KULLUK. Why in the name of humanity did Shell need 360’ and $200M cost?[/QUOTE]
My guess would be that since they were working so far away from port they wanted to make sure they could have just about anything on site that you could possibly need. I know there were other vessels slated to work as “supply boats” but i’m sure they were going to carry some load or fluids for the rig at some point. And if they wanted them on site constantly (not sure if they did or not) then you need lots of supplies/food and somewhere to store them. Take into account tanks big enough to hold your fuel supply needed, ballast, potable, lube oil, etc… Once you start planning on staying at sea for months at a time square footage runs out very quickly.
I’m sure more than anything they knew how delicate drilling was in this area and what kind of shit storm they would be in if something went wrong. So, what can you do better than build the biggest, baddest, state of the art vessel to make sure nothing goes wrong? Only things went wrong and it may be a disaster after its all said and done. I just don’t think they would have convinced people that they could take any vessel up there and do the job that everyone said couldn’t be done. Dino Chouest said very publicly that the new vessels being built would be “ice class capable” if needed. So its very apparent to me that the future held a need for lots of vessels up there to support future activity. There was also rumblings that Chouest had plans to build more of these ice breakers in the future. You take a deepwater rig in the gulf and they usually have anywhere from 4-8 boats dedicated for supplying them. To work up in Alaska the Gulf Model has to be modified significanlty because of the conditions and lack of infrastructure up there. There are no crewboats capable of operating up there so maybe the Aiviq had to take the place of an AHTS, ice breaker, several crewboats and the role of a supply boat as well.
At the end of the day I still think this vessel can do the job once the kinks are ironed out of it. The bad thing is the only time you can find these kinks is putting it in the conditions it was designed to work in. In this case it just happened to be some of the most extreme conditions and a high profile job.
Well I do not know what tankage the AIVIQ has but to be a warehouse vessel, the ship is wrong for the job. It has virtually no usable deckspace to store spare gear aboard. As a towing vessel, we see that any mariner with towing experience can say that it is simply too large to be able to do the close maneuvering required. Mind you too that the anchors for the KULLUK are not massive nor is there any huge amounts of chain needed since the rig only works in a couple of hundred feet of water. This is not a semi working in 6000’!
If you look at the icebreaking AHTS’s CanMar had built in the 80’s to work in the Arctic you see what a properly designed fully ice rated support vessel should be.
TALAGY (formerly CANMAR KIGORIAK)
I know personally how Shell can be sold terribly flawed designs and pay way too much for them so would be not surprised one bit if this is the case here. I mean $200M…was that really required!
Why do these companies not truly vet the vessels they pay so dearly for and the companies that provide them? Yes, I know it’s the Houston/Galliano good old boy’s club, but look at how much money is being wasted? You’d think the men signing off on the deals would be a bit more careful to make the sure they aren’t getting fucked!
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If I had to guess the Aiviq would be useless in 40kts+ wind and 20’ seas. My guess with that massive house she prob. has immense trouble turning broadside or maneuvering in any such way due to the superstructure.
need to see the DP capability plots and then you will know
The design is really just experimental, looked like a good idea…but reality and the forces of nature may have shown otherwise
The capability would have been known before they built it, the DP companies rarely get that wrong
My guess is ( without knowing the size of the bow thrusters) is it would hold position with 50kts on the beam
The specs show 2 each 2000HP tunnel thursters, plus a 2600 HP drop down on the bow, 2 each 1400 HP tunnel thrusters on the stern, 2 CPP wheels in nozzles driven by 4 C280 Cats, and I am almost positive independent rudders to be DP2 class. With that much power she SHOULD hold station in a typhon, as long as the engines stay running.
This seemed to be a problem
Shell probably had a lot of ideas and “needs” that were probably unnecessary and contributed to the vessel being grossly bigger than maybe it should have been. Again, maybe they were doing a lot of this for the media and to ease the complaining from all of the folks who kept looking at the possible disasters. In my shoreside dealings most people with the drilling/oil companies don’t understand or having much working knowledge of vessels. They see a spec sheet and think it can hold everything at 100% capacity simultaneously. They are always wanting more out a boat than it was designed for or can handle. I just think that regardless of the vessel that was designed and built it still would have been truly an experiment.
[QUOTE=ChiefRob;93231]The specs show 2 each 2000HP tunnel thursters, plus a 2600 HP drop down on the bow, 2 each 1400 HP tunnel thrusters on the stern, 2 CPP wheels in nozzles driven by 4 C280 Cats, and I am almost positive independent rudders to be DP2 class. With that much power she SHOULD hold station in a typhon, as long as the engines stay running.[/QUOTE]
Great for DP’ing in a typhoon but not towing in one! Not a vessel you would want to try to rig for emergency towing is such weather. How can you maneuver such a beast up under a tow to recover a lost wire?
Regardless of the flaws in AIVIQ’s size or configuration, there is a bigger issue here of the tow gear used. Here are some important questions to reask?
- what was the size of the towing shackles rigged?
- were the pins for those shackles welded?
- what was the maximum strain used in calculating the adequacy of that gear for the planned voyage?
- was there an emergency tow wire rigged with its own seperate bridle or did they just have a wire clipped to the side of the rig without any surge gear? what was the calculated strain that emergency gear could withstand?
- how long were the bridle legs and what size chain?
- was the fishplate proof tested before being put into use? how heavy was it? it is now deformed?
- did the AIVIQ have an Orville Hook or anything else it could use to snag the dangling bridle?
- which shackle failed in the gear and how did it fail? Fractured, deformed or just the pin fallen out?
- what is the condition of the socket on the tow wire now?
Something caused that tow to part and the big question is what? Did it tightline? That would explain a parted shackle more than anything else?
- if the wire did in fact tightline, HOW IN THE HELL WAS THAT ALLOWED TO HAPPEN AT ALL?
Congress wants to know now too this should get interesting.
[QUOTE=Saltine;93238]Shell probably had a lot of ideas and “needs” that were probably unnecessary and contributed to the vessel being grossly bigger than maybe it should have been. Again, maybe they were doing a lot of this for the media and to ease the complaining from all of the folks who kept looking at the possible disasters. In my shoreside dealings most people with the drilling/oil companies don’t understand or having much working knowledge of vessels. They see a spec sheet and think it can hold everything at 100% capacity simultaneously. They are always wanting more out a boat than it was designed for or can handle. I just think that regardless of the vessel that was designed and built it still would have been truly an experiment.[/QUOTE]
I will say that there was a marine superintendent at Frontier that I sat down with when I was hired who had many years of working for CANMAR in the arctic and I remember seeing a drawing on the wall behind his desk of a very large (100+m) arctic AHTS on the wall. I asked him if that was Shell’s vessel and he said that it wasn’t and that ECO’s design was a joke and that it was all wrong for the job. Since I was there to talk with him about the BULLY rigs, I didn’t ask him more questions about why he felt that way. I wished now I had but when the AIVIQ was first seen in photos, I could not help but notice how different it was from any of the several CANMAR AHTS’s which do in fact look like an AHTS and not some gargantuan accommodations vessel with a stubby back deck and enough quarters to maintain a small army aboard. With such a deck could AIVIQ ever be a “true” anchorboat?
SMIT SAKHALIN (formerly CANMAR MISCAROO)
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I see it in the regas ships, tugs etc built to do “collateral” duties (hotel/crewboat) and/or to accommodate concessions to the opponents against an operation. For example voluntarily a class of tugs I deal with are zero discharge (capable) and have LARGE grey water tanks so pretty much nothing goes overboard in theory. Keeps enviros happy although generally not required. Ads a lot of tankage and free surface. Less fuel capacity. Not necessarily grey water but I’d expect they had to ad a lot of BS to that boat in order to quell concerns and to give everyone a boner over how fancy it is.
A good one was the cooling water from a LNG regas overboard had to be below a certain threshold, lest they raise the surrounding water a millionth a degree and upset the whales or clams.
ironic that these new Russian arctic capable vessels are announced today
By Trude Pettersen
January 04, 2013
The 86 meters long and 19 meters wide vessels will be used for patrols and rescue operations in offshore oil and gas fields.
They are highly specialized, have a complex level of equipment and are designed for searching for and rescuing ships in distress, evacuating people and providing them with medical care, the shipbuilder said in a press release.
Financing will be provided by the Russian state and has already been secured for both projects. The total volume of the orders is 150 million euros.
The vessels are icebreakers of the second highest ice class, suitable for rescue operations in harsh environments. They can be used both for icebreaking operations in harbours and waters with an ice thickness of 1m as well as for fire-fighting and combating oil spills from the sea.
The vessels can study the ocean floor and damaged objects at depths of up to 1,000m. Furthermore, the vessels will be equipped with a helipad on the bow.
The engineering and start of construction will take place in 2013 with delivery scheduled for the spring of 2015.
and only 150M Euros for the pair…two truly “Arctic Ready” vessels for the price of just one AIVIQ!
I am beginning to discover how much was invested in specialty iceclassed support vessels back in the 80’s to work in the Canadian Arctic
Gulf/Beaudrill vessels IKALUK, KALVIK, MISCAROO and TERRY FOX.
SIMPLY AMAZING!
Nice looking vessels for sure. Where did they go off to? Shell did have the Nordica, Tor Viking II, and Botnica up North in addition to the Aiviq. Tor Viking II was a good looking AHTS boat!! Too bad they couldn’t use it to help the Aiviq tow the Kulluk down South.
[QUOTE=Kingrobby;93275]Nice looking vessels for sure. Where did they go off to? Shell did have the Nordica, Tor Viking II, and Botnica up North in addition to the Aiviq. Tor Viking II was a good looking AHTS boat!! Too bad they couldn’t use it to help the Aiviq tow the Kulluk down South.[/QUOTE]
all are now scattered across the globe but my comment is that there was a large body of experience and knowledge with men who had been in the Canadian Arctic 25 years ago so one must ask if any of that was tapped by ECO’s naval architects before finalizing AIVIQ’s design or if by being the biggest and the baddest assed offshore services company on the world with two Antarctic research vessels they already knew everything there was to know and needed no outside advice…
…the world wonders?