Kvaerner Construction has positioned the 770-tonne roof of a third Liquid Natural Gas (LNG)storage tank a month ahead of schedule despite working through India's monsoon period. It has now completed roof lifts on three of the world's largest LNG tanks in just six months.
The construction team took advantage of a break in the rain - sometimes upto 370mm a day - to raise the roof 40 metres to its final position with air pressure in an operation which lasted just six hours. It took the same team seven-and-a-half hours to lift the first roof into place in March. The second roof was positioned in May.
The completed tanks stand 70 meters tall and are 80 metres across - making each one larger than London's Royal Albert Hall. With all three constructed and sealed ahead of schedule internal process engineering can proceed unaffected by the weather.
To speed the construction programme, the roofs were builts inside the tanks while the tank walls were being simultaneously constructed. Each roof has a 30-metre high dome and is made up of more than 600 individual steel sections. Two giant electric fans, which produce 900 cubic feet of air per minute, were used to lift the roofs into position.
Kvaerner Construction is the main contractor on this US$ 278 million turnkey project for Enron affiliates, which are managing the construction of LNG facilitis for the Dabhol Power Company. The contract is to supply, construct and equip facilities to offload LNG from ships in minus 160 degrees centigrade liquid form, pipe it to the tanks, draw it off, vaporise it into gas and then pump it into a power station.
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