A transport and installation barge (TIB) ordered by LUKOIL arrived today at the Astrakhan sea floating depot. The Company will utilize the TIB for the construction of offshore platforms at the Vladimir Filanovsky field in the Caspian Sea.

The TIB is equipped with a crane, whose loading capacity is 400 tons. It will be used for pile mounting to substructures of the offshore platforms and installation of catwalk bridges between them, as well as for the installation of the topside sections of the drilling platform (IRP-1), a central processing platform (CPP), a living quarters module (LQP -1), and a riser block (RB).

The TIB’s loading capacity is 13,450 tons, length is 140.3 meters, and width is 62.3 meters. The T-shaped barge consists of two main pontoons and two additional pontoons (outriggers), which ensure an increased load capacity and vessel stability while transporting over-tonnaged and oversized cargo, for instance, IRP-1 and CPP topside sections.

The TIB is named after one of the former heads of LUKOIL’s Geological Service, Yuri Stepanovich Kuvykin, (1935-2012), who contributed greatly to the discovery of a major oil and gas bearing province in the northern part of the Caspian Sea. The Sarmatskoye oil and gas condensate field discovered by LUKOIL in the Russian Sector of the Caspian Sea in 2003 was also renamed after Yuri Kuvykin to pay homage to him.

This May the TIB will be utilized to install the substructures of IRP-1, LQP-1, CPP and RB at the V. Filanovsky field.