Confident partnership
Serimax support pays dividends
The recently completed Langeled Pipeline is the longest and deepest subsea trunkline in the world: 973km of 44" and 42" gas trunkline stretch from northern Norway to the east coast of England. Despite the enormity of the task, Langeled was finished a month ahead of schedule. Serimax played a key role in the project’s success, providing automatic equipment, training, technical support and welding consumables on the pipelay vessel.
The challenge
Over the course of two welding seasons in which more than 27,000km of welding wire was used, the repair rate on the Langeled pipeline fell from an impressive 2.35% in 2005 to just 1.45% in 2006.
Senior Project Manager Laurent Lamps attributes this success to the pre-training of welders and the qualification of procedures that Serimax delivered, as part of our contract.
"The training and qualification was carried out at the Serimax centre in Malaysia," says Laurent. "The specific welding equipment – Saturne torches, which have been developed especially for trunkline projects – was transported to Malaysia. When the welders went on site, they were able to hit the ground running, because they had already been trained on, and had used the Serimax equipment."
Serimax also provided a very experienced and skilled supervisor on-site. This paid dividends for the client, who was able to get maximum benefit from Saturne’s exceptionally fast welding cycle and laying rate – up to 216 welds per day.
The result
The achievements of the Langeled project have raised huge interest across the globe. The longest, and perhaps one of the most ambitious subsea pipelines in the world now supplies a fifth of all gas to the UK. While Serimax did not, in this instance, provide our core skill of welding, we were able to significantly impact on the success of the project through the provision of equipment, training and supervision.
