Turkish ship recyclers are scrapping a pipelay vessel no longer wanted by Allseas Group.

The Swiss offshore engineering contractor sold the 10,643-gt Calamity Jane (built 1978) to ship EU-approved ship recycler Leyal Demtas Gemi Sokum at Aliaga in early November for an undisclosed sum.

TradeWinds understands that the ship has been beached and demolition work has begun.

The scrapping of the Calamity Jane leaves Allseas with five pipelay vessels in a 11-ship fleet that includes a drillship and large platform supply vessels.

Sources close to the company said that it has no plans to scrap any of its other pipelay vessels in the immediate future.

The Calamity Jane’s last major deployment was earlier this year in the South China Sea, working on the China National Offshore Oil Co (CNOOC) Lingshui 17-2 field.

The ship provided trenching support to the Allseas-owned 56,172-gt pipelayer Audacia (built 2005). The two vessels installed 160 kilometres of subsea pipelines and multiple structures in water depths up to 1,500 metres.

The vessel is typical of the larger offshore assets that have become the mainstay of the Turkish shipbreaking industry in recent years, together with cruiseships and ferries.

High-profile operators in these market sectors have opted to send tonnage to EU-approved recycling facilities at Aliaga to meet their stated corporate social responsibility goals as well as to avoid the possibility of garnering negative publicity for selling their ships to non-EU-approved yards on the Indian subcontinent.

Allseas was also required to sell the Calamity Jane to an approved recycling facility as it was registered in Malta, an EU member state.

A glut of offshore and cruise tonnage has led to congestion issues at Aliaga, with ships cold-stacked in Greece while awaiting a beaching slot.

However, as Tradewinds reported on Monday, these congestion problems are expected to ease as two more recycling yards — Simsekler and Avsar Gemi Sokum — have now been given EU approval.

This brought the number of EU-approved shiprecycling facilities at Aliaga to eight, up from four at the beginning of 2020. It also raised the EU-approved recycling capacity at Aliaga by nearly 106,000 ldt per year to just under 488,000 ldt.

The EU Ship Recycling Regulation was introduced in 2013 by the European Parliament out of frustration at slow pace of the ratification of the 2009 Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships.