Resinex has recently manufactured a stock of 266 buoyancy modules, the so-called “tie-in floats”, for two offshore projects in Nigeria and Qatar.
The final customer is China Offshore Oil Engineering Co. Limited, which in turn supplied Dangote Oil Refining Company and Qatar Petroleum.
COOEC, leader in the petroleum engineering field, when approaching the pipe laying deployment activities chose Resinex for its long experience in the field.
Out of the 266 tie-in floats, 156 modules were allocated to the Dangote Refinery Pipeline Project, while the remaining 110 to the EPIC for Pipeline Deployment for the NFA Wellhead Platform in Qatari waters. They were all utilized for pipe positioning till 60 mt depth.
Resinex was one of the world’s first producers of pipe deployment floats: starting from the early 90s, more than 3000 floats have been manufactured for the world’s largest pipe laying projects (http://www.resinextrad.com/en/the-widest-range-of-pipe-deployment-floats-tie-in/).
The tie-in floats are used to support the weight of the tubes during the launch of a pipeline before it touches the seabed.
These floats are a flagship product of the wide Resinex range, and they have been designed with a saddle in the lower part in order to match several pipeline sizes and diameters.
The tie-in floats designed in the last months for COOEC have quite compact dimensions and have been specifically conceived to match the particular dimension of the pipelines: the ones destined for the Qatar project were just 800x1000x1400 mm, a very reduced size compared to the standard one. The Nigerian floats were 1100x1150x1650 mm instead.
In order to validate the resistance to external pressure, Resinex carries out internal tests in water-filled pressure autoclaves, which simulate the operating conditions in the sea. Also fitting tests are performed in Resinex Marine Research Centre.
Everything has also been specifically designed to optimize the storage/packing operations in standard shipping containers, and to maximize the number of items that can be transported inside the containers to be delivered all over the world.
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