Hamburg, Germany based Hansa Heavy Lift (HHL)that specializes in heavy lift, super heavy lift and project freight, is looking to ramp up its involvement in the offshore industry with a particular aim to transportation and installation in the subsea oil & gas market as well as the offshore windfarm industry.
The company operates a modern fleet of 19 vessels around the 5 years of age, equipped with heavy lift cranes and with a combined lifting capacity of 1,400mt that can operate on its own regardless of the local infrastructure. All vessels are ice-strengthened and can sail along routes with an ice thickness of up to 0.8mtr.
The huge industrial development projects now taking place in northern Russia, heavylift specialists are now looking at transits along the Northern Route more often. The HHL New York and HHL Amazon, which both hold Ice Class E3 equivalent to Russian Arc.4 (Finnish-Swedish Ice Class 1A), successfully completed journeys along the western boundary of the Northern Route in late 2015, delivering the heat exchanger for an LNG plant as well as other power generation equipment.
“The NSR is an increasingly important route and our use of it nearly doubled in the last year,” says HHL md and cco Joerg Roehl. “However, it takes careful preparation, as well as experience and the right equipment in order to succeed.”
Roehl believes that the reason a number of other leading heavy lift operators – including Rickmers Linie and SAL Heavy Lift – are based in Hamburg is that customers with precious one-off, outsize cargoes prefer to trust companies with an ingrained tradition of cargo handling expertise.
