Delivery of lifting slings for Swift Drilling.

FibreMax will supply 4 custom made 320T lifting slings to the new Dutch drilling company “Swift Drilling NV”. The slings will be used on the new drill rig “Swift 10”, a light weight and powerful cantilever rig which allows highly automated drilling operations. In the next five years the rig will be used for oil and gas drilling for Shell and NAM (Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij BV) in the UK and Netherlands sectors of the North Sea.

The slings will be used to lower/lift well parts in water depths of 40 meters. Lowering/lifting of the parts is done in sections, reason for the slings to be coupled/decoupled in sections as well. All handling of the slings during coupling/decoupling has to be done manually, so light weight was preferred by the engineers of NAM. Another requirement was that the slings need to have a special “hang-off” attachment to enable coupling/decoupling during the process. For this specific requirement FibreMax has designed a special end termination to match existing rig equipment and that makes it possible to couple/decouple the slings during operation. In this way a safe and easy operation is made possible for the workers on the rig. 

The slings will be made of aramid Twaron® fibres. FibreMax slings made of aramid Twaron® fibres have almost 90% less weight than steel wire rope and are highly resistant to a marine environment. Another important feature of aramid Twaron® fibres is the negligible creep percentage which was considered to be very important by the engineers of NAM.