ScanRope Subsea Cables, cable and umbilical supplier, is upgrading its manufacturing plant at Tønsberg in southern Norway as it begins to promote itself on the international market with the assistance of Intsok.
The company has a worldwide reference list from its days as part of the ABB group, but in February 2002, its ownership changed hands. It is now owned two-thirds by ScanRope and one-third by some of the employees, says managing director Jørn Kjelsberg. ScanRope provides some assistance to the company's efforts to internationalize both through its office in Aberdeen and its part-time presence in Houston.
The current upgrading project at the Tønsberg plant will both expand production capacity and modernize work processes. A central control and inspection system has been installed and some rebuilding work will also be carried out, for example, to install underfloor cable tracks.
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The plant has good cabling capacity, with nine insets per operation, extrusion up to 200 mm outside diameter (OD), and two armoring machines with capacity for winding up to 8 mm OD wire on a production diameter up to 240 mm. There are three carousels each with handling capacity of 650 tons. Load-out facilities include a quay area of 600 sq m, 50 m of waterfront and a 190-ton crane.
In addition to the cables and umbilicals, the company also supplies termination heads and associated equipment. It designed, built and tested a 3-ton termination head for the world's first subsea processing system, Norsk Hydro's Troll Pilot, and rebuilt the head after a problem arose with the high-voltage coupler supplied for it.
It also supplied the 3.8-km steel-tube umbilical for the project. The umbilical contains signal cables, fiber-optic cables and hydraulic and service lines, as well as a 4 mw three-phase power supply, sufficient to run an injection pump as well as the separator. The umbilical is the largest yet manufactured by the company, with a 160-mm diameter and weight of 53.5 kg/m in air.
On Statoil's Troll A compression project, ScanRope Subsea Cables has been subcontracted by ABB to supply mechanical components for the pull-in connection of the subsea power cables and to assist with the installation operation, which is scheduled for 2004/05.
