The Statoil Kristin Project in 2004 (carried out by Technip) required laying of 10" subsea pipe with simultaneous fixing of a piggyback heating cable onto the pipe during the lay operation.

In order to fix the cable to the pipe and provide supplementary subsea protection it was also necessary to install heavy duty plastic conduit banded to the pipe during the pipe lay operation.

This difficult procedure required a custom designed handling system for transportation of the conduit from the storage area up to a new platform on the top of the pipe ramp and to semi-automate conduit installation onto the cable/pipe.

• Variable speed AC drive systems for the horizontal conveyor & gantry lift elevator.
  
• Electrically powered constant tension roller box for conduit assembly.
  
• RF telemetry linked cable tension monitoring system.
  
• Ancillary pneumatic & hydraulic handling equipment design.
  

All of the equipment was fully designed, built and tested in house before shipping to Technip-Coflexip’s Orkanger Spoolbase in Norway.

Installation and pre-commissioning at the Vigor construction yard took place over a number of trips before final mobilization onto CSO Apache.

Trials of the final system yielded impressive results with combined pipe/cable lay speeds of up to 400m/hour being achieved.

The performance figures met and exceeded the original design specification.