Semco Maritime wins order for Expansion of Maersk Guardian

Semco Maritime entered into an agreement with Maersk Drilling for the expansion of accommodation rig Maersk Guardian, which will be inserted at various fields in the Danish part of the North Sea from September 2016.

The order for Semco Maritime comprises installation of new accommodation blocks as a supplement to existing quarters on the jack-up rig. Semco Maritime won the order in an open tender with several Danish and foreign participants. Head of Semco Maritime’s rig division, Senior Vice President Lars Skov Christensen, is very pleased with the order for Maersk Guardian, which is strategically important in a market under pressure.

"Our shipyard-in-a-box concept is a figurative concept of flexibility, which allows us to swiftly relocate our rig engineers to where the work is," said Christensen. "We can move out in a matter of a few hours or days, depending on the type of the assignment or the geographical location of where we are going. The concept simultaneously minimizes our fixed costs without compromising quality."

Maersk Guardian is currently located in Frederikshavn, where the rig will be situated during the entire refurbishing period. The largest part of the Semco order – construction of the new accommodation blocks – is performed in Gdansk in Poland. The entire accommodation block unit is then sailed to Frederikshavn and installed on the rig, Vice President and main responsible for the project Nikolaj Vejlgaard explains: "We have never constructed an accommodation block this size before. The sheer size makes it impossible for us to perform the work at our own facilities in Esbjerg, and we have therefore placed the assignment with our skilled collaboration partners in Poland, said Nikolaj Vejlgaard.

The 142-room accommodation block weighs 560 ton and is set to arrive at Frederikshavn in August with subsequent final installation of the entire block a couple of weeks later."

Maersk Guardian has a leg length of 157 meters and was constructed in Japan in 1986. It is designed for all-year operation in the North Sea.