The jacket for the Neptun Deep gas production platform has left Saipem’s Arbatax yard in Sardinia, Italy, for the €4.0 billion ($4.6 billion) project offshore Romania.
OMV Petrom is developing the project as operator with Romgaz as partner. Neptun Deep is the largest offshore natural gas development now under way in the European Union.
The steel jacket weighs about 7,500 tonnes and rises around 135 m. Its base is approximately 50 m by 50 m, placing it among the largest structures completed at Saipem’s Arbatax shipyard.
At the Black Sea site, the Saipem 7000 crane vessel will lift the jacket and position it vertically. The structure will then be secured to the seabed with eight steel piles, each 2.5 m in diameter.
Saipem won the engineering, procurement, construction and installation contract for the production platform in August 2023. The topsides are being built at Saipem’s Karimun yard in Indonesia.
The contract scope also includes subsea work at the Domino field, where water depth is around 1,000 m, and at the Pelican field. Saipem will also lay an approximately 160 km, 30-inch gas pipeline and an associated fibre-optic cable from the offshore platform to the Romanian coast, including micro-tunneling for the shore approach.
