Teekay has opened up to the wider industry about its experience of successfully refloating a laden LNG carrier following a potentially dangerous grounding incident three years ago.
Teekay Gas Services director for commercial and marine operations, Andrew Roberts, told the LNG Emergency Ship-to-Ship Forum that the 165,500-cbm Magellan Spirit (built 2009) grounded as a result of navigational error on 5 January 2015 as it was leaving Nigeria LNG’s Bonny Island terminal.
The vessel, which was loaded with 163,289 cbm of LNG, went hard aground in dense clay and mud 250 metres outside the main shipping channel.
Roberts described the ship and shore process the company followed in the wake of the grounding.
Teekay, which has been more proactive than many in sharing its experiences with the LNG shipping industry and giving open responses about other incidents, looked at three options for refloating the Magellan Spirit.
It quickly ruled out one of these, which involved dredging around the vessel, as no suitable equipment was available and the vessel was so hard aground.
Teekay then made three attempts to pull the ship off, the last with salvors onboard, and Roberts explained the complexity of the tug arrangement and operation that this entailed.
It then moved on to its third option, which was to lighten the vessel. This involved offloading 45,000 cbm of LNG from the No. 3 tank in 13 hours, into Excelerate Energy’s 138,000-cbm regasification vessel Excellence (built 2005).
Roberts said not many vessels were available for this operation and highlighted that the Excellence had the LNG ship-to-ship (STS) transfer kit onboard and was available at short notice.
Local currents were an issue in bringing the Excellence alongside, he said, but once the Magellan Spirit’s tank had been emptied, it started to float free and was “ready to go”.
Both ships then moved to Lome in Togo and reversed the cargo transfer in open waters.
The Magellan Spirit sustained only minor paint damage, none of the crew were injured and there was no loss of cargo, he said.
Roberts, who gave a similar presentation to the Society of International Gas Tanker and Terminal Operators earlier this year, was reluctant to give details about the cost of the operation, but said sourcing STS kit elsewhere would probably have escalated the cost.
