Development of the New Icebreaking Tug for Northern Caspian Sea

摘要

The development of oil exploration/production offshore Kazakhstan in the northern Caspian Sea has been proceeding quite extensively. New vessels are needed and one example of recent vessel deliveries are five icebreaking tugs, Mangystau 1-5. The first vessel has been in operation 1.5 years and full-scale ice trials were performed in March 2012. The project has been really international as the basic design was done by Aker Arctic in Finland, the shipbuilding contract was done between STX OSV (Norway) and Caspian Offshore Construction (COC) (Kazakhstan). The vessels were built in Romania by STX. The paper will first of all describe how this arrangement worked out, how the vessels look like and finally discuss the full-scale trial results.