CRC-Evans Offshore Ltd, UKCRC-Evans has provided equipment and services for virtually every aspect of onshore and offshore pipeline construction for over 80 years. Over this time, the company has designed and built state-of-the-art equipment that is engineered specifically for the unique demands of offshore pipeline construction.

CRC-Evans Offshore’s capabilities include comprehensive spoolbase, S-lay, J-lay and fabrication services, delivering a single source solution for welding, field joint coating (FJC), design engineering and pipe handling, while inspection and non-destructive testing (NDT) are provided by its Stanley Inspection team.

In addition to offering advanced offshore pipeline construction technologies, the company has a highly experienced team of offshore specialists who are trained to directly support automatic welding operations and offshore-qualified management staff to lead this specialised offshore team. CRC-Evans’ employees understand the needs of the offshore industry and operators.

CRC-Evans Offshore has been involved in an array of projects (from Brazil, to Norway, to Egypt), with work ranging from mobilising a temporary spoolbase in Cyprus, to welding corrosion resistant alloy (CRA) clad materials in the US.

One of the company’s recent projects is the Total Kaombo development, where CRC-Evans Offshore performed 11 002 welds with a repair rate of 1.3%. The company has recently completed the mainline fabrication of over 290 km of in-field and export pipelines where it was responsible for welding, NDT and FJCs.

The contract – awarded by installation contractor, Technip, as part of a consortium – was carried out at Technip’s Dande spoolbase, north of the Angolan capital, Luanda. Welders from both the UK and Angola spent 39 weeks on site.

CRC-Evans Offshore successfully integrated into Technip’s safety targets and achieved the lagging and leading indicator targets. By implementing its ‘5-a-Day’ and ‘Getting The Job Done Safely’ campaigns alongside Pipeline Induction Heat, the company played an integral role in assisting Technip with adhering to its ‘7 Steps’ plan. This ensured that Total aligned with its ‘12 Golden Rules’ safety campaign. During this project, over 1 million man hours were culminated without a lost time incident.

With fatigue issues being a vital factor in the design of pipelines, all welds were performed using CRC-Evans’ cold metal transfer root pass and the company’s proven pulsed gas metal arc welding fill and cap

with P625 bugs. Furthermore, the welding parameters of every weld were recorded and collated by the company’s cloud-based data logging system, uLog.

The fatigue design gave rise to tight defect acceptance criteria in several lines for which near surface defects were limited to 1 mm high x 3 mm in length. A silicon controlled rectifier quality pulsed synergic wave form was developed especially for this purpose in collaboration with Fronius. Together with effective application by the company’s welding team, this was the cornerstone of success.

LOOKING AHEADPaul Alexander, Global Business Development Director at CRC-Evans Offshore, said: ❝For 2017, S-lay, double jointing and CRA welding in the Middle East and southeast Asia are key focuses for CRC-Evans Offshore, where newly developed technology will allow the company to increase market share. The low oil price has led to a reduction in the number of offshore pipeline installation contractors, and this trend continues. At the same time, CRC-Evans see that the future market has both cost and technology challenges, which can be addressed by a specialist service provider working closely with the established pipeline installation contractors.❞

OFFSHORE Technology Review / 2017

OFFSHORETechnology Review

Figure 2. Pipeline Induction Heat’s patented Solaris radiant heater.

Figure 1. Operating the P625 automatic welding machine on the Kaombo project.