At 490 meters (1,600 feet) long, 115 meters across and 13.5 meters deep, Hyundai has announced that it now has the world’s largest drydock. Imagine an area roughly the size of 7 soccer fields and that is what you would see at the new H-Dock in Ulsan, South Korea.  The dock is custom designed to build floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels and includes two 1,600ton goliath cranes.  Traditionally FPSO’s hull sides and topside are built separately. The hull is built in a ship building drydock and then transported to a quay for topside installation. This method is time consuming and makes the use of a crane very difficult.  The new H-Dock allows the hull and topside to be built side-by-side, improving efficiency by 15% and reducing build time to about 1 month according to Hyundai.

“The H-dock comes from HHI’s 37 year shipbuilding know how. With this drydock, HHI can increase its productivity and strengthen its competitive edge for offshore facilities such as FPSO and LNG-FPSO,” said Mr. Oh Byung-wook, COO of Offshore and Engineering Division.”

The first FPSO ship to be built at the new dock will be the USAN EPSO ordered by Elf Petroleum Nigeria Ltd. in February 2008. Hyundai will receive $1.6 billion for the ship, which is designed to store and refine large quantities of crude oil and gas. The vessel to be built for the subsidiary of France-based Total SA will be 320 meters long, 61 meters wide and 32 meters deep.

A photo of H-Dock, the world's largest drydock (Courtesy Hyundai Heavy Industries)

For more information on FSPOs -

FSPO.net

Deep Oil – A Nightly Business Report Special which looks at the FSPO Discoverer Deep Seas

Offshore Technology – Kikeh Project, Overview of a large scale FSPO project near Malaysia