Current clients include Aker Solutions, Heerema, Helix Wellops, Siemens, Statoil, Total and Transocean. They value Protea’s ability to rapidly deliver high quality handling equipment tailored to their specific needs, on a turnkey basis and at an affordable price.
Environmental considerations are playing an increasingly important role for Protea when developing and delivering handling systems for its global customers – from meeting extreme operating environment challenges and considering the environmental impact of its products, to delivering equipment for use in new ‘green’ energy industries.
“We tailor the design of our products to allow optimum performance in challenging environmental conditions, both onshore and offshore and, of course, to minimise their environmental impact”, explained Tomasz Paszkiewicz, Protea’s managing director.
This ethos was highlighted by a recent project to supply a pair of of LNG cranes to the Yamal Gas Terminal in Northern Russia. Key design drivers were to ensure that the cranes could work in very low temperatures (down to -50 degrees centigrade) without risk of contaminating the environment, whilst fully complying with the latest Russian market certification requirements.
Following installation at the terminal, careful design, appropriate component selection and use of high grade steel (S355NL/ML) will allow reliable operation in these extreme environmental conditions.
Going electric
It is also worth noting that future generations of Protea crane will feature all electric drive systems in place of traditional hydraulic power systems – Protea engineers are currently developing an all electric crane for cargo handling operations.
“Electric drive technology continues to evolve rapidly and the advantages are clear – there is both a reduction in power consumption and noise whilst there is no possibility of environmental contamination from an oil spillage. We are looking forward to testing our first fully electric crane next year at our state of the art manufacturing facility in Kluczbork, southern Poland,” added Mr Paszkiewicz .
Offshore wind
In addition to supplying equipment to work in environmental extremes, Protea is delivering handling systems to support the renewable energy industry, particularly offshore wind.
Protea is already a proven supplier to this growing industry with previous deliveries including Proteus 4mT SWL Ram Luffing Offshore Pedestal Cranes for the Sheringham Shoal Offshore Wind Farm in the UK, owned and operated by Statoil / Statkraft.
It has also recently launched an all new service crane targeted at the offshore wind market. The compact 2t SWL crane is an ideal lifting solution for light lifting and handling operations on unmanned platforms, such as offshore wind turbines.
At the other end of the scale, Protea is currently developing a huge heavy lift crane with a safe working load of 1600t to support the installation of the latest offshore wind turbines.
It provides a high capacity lifting capability at both short and long outreaches over a large radius, a key feature for offshore windfarm operations. Again the crane will be made of high grade steel (S960) to offer a weight efficient system to allow the cranes to be mounted on smaller and lighter floating vessels with faster transit speeds.
“We see environmental design drivers and the environmental industries as an increasingly important part of our business and our client’s business going forward. As such we are committed to developing unique solutions that will balance environmental challenges with economic demands,” added Mr Paszkiewicz.