DEME has announced that it has launched the Living Stone – the world’s most advanced subsea cable installation/trenching vessel. The ship features dual-fuel engines, using LNG as its primary fuel, and features dynamic positioning 3 (DP3) capability.
The vessel was launched at the LaNaval shipyard near Bilbao, Spain. The ceremony was initiated by Sarah Tommelein – the spouse of Bart Tommelein, the Vice-Minister-President of the Government of Flanders and Flemish Minister for Energy.
The vessel will be deployed by Tideway – a Dutch subsidiary of DEME – and is capable of accommodating up to 100 crew members. It will serve transport and installation projects, including offshore power cable installations, interconnectors for the future European Supergrid, etc. It will be delivered in 2Q17, and will be deployed to the Merkur offshore wind farm in Germany (45 km north of Borkum in the North Sea), for the installation of inter array cables. It will also aid with the cable installation at the Hornsea Project One in the UK.
The Living Stone has two turntables below deck, which each have a cable capacity of 5000 t. Together, the turntables are capable of carrying and transporting over 200 km of cable that can be installed in a single trip. The vessel also features 3500 m2 of deck space, facilitating a cable handling system with reliable and innovative cable handling tools for cable ends, connections and cable protection systems. In addition to this, the vessel is able to be equipped with a third carrousel above deck with an extra load capacity of 2000 t and a 600 t crane. Tideway developed a system to install cranes faster and more efficiently in longer lengths and with fewer offshore joints than other cable installation vessels.
Edited from press release by David Rowlands