CEVA Chosen By LLT To Manage Transport Of Oil Equipment For Technip
By Anuja Abraham
CEVA Logistics, one of the world’s leading supply chain management companies, has been selected to design and manage the transfer of a twenty meter high, 165 ton, long loading tower from Leroux & Lotz Technologies’ (LLT’s) plant at Nantes to the port of Technip Flexi’s site in Trait, near Rouen, France.
The 165 ton equipment, produced at LLT’s workshops, took more than eight months to build, involving around 35 skilled blue collar workers with diverse expertise (sheet metal, mechanical, welding) involving 12,000 hours in total. A dozen local SMEs also contributed to this project.
The tower, once lifted and propped, will be towed by two tractors (shooter and pusher) synchronized by an automatic extra slow transmission over a distance of 2,2km to the Port of Nantes. The wide and long vehicle, weighing 341 tons, will travel at very low speed (100 meters / hour) to avoid sudden braking. The tower will then be loaded on a special barge to travel up the River Seine to arrive at Technip’s facilities. The total transfer time, which began on Monday 25 June with the load of the tower on the two coupled trailers, is scheduled over several days and could, depending on the weather, take up to a week.
In order to move this tower, which is taller than a six story block of flats, CEVA’s Project Department had to plan and design a solution incorporating elements of strong technical complexity, meanwhile getting official approvals required for such an exceptional transport.
According to the agreement, CEVA’s services included the preliminary localization and computer simulation of the route, calculation and study on the load factors, selection of specialized land and river carriers, tree pruning, requests for building/striking elements such as public lighting, telecommunication and power lines, or cutting a high tension power line depending upon the progression of the long vehicle on the course of the route.
