IN

HISTORYSTEEPED

by JEFF CAMPAGNADRAGADOS OFFSHORE’S

RICH HISTORY IS GIVING THEM

INTERNATIONAL TRACTION

Yard of Algeciras

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tures for Brazil, a modular fabrication

for the expansion of the Mongstad re-

finery in Norway, and fabrication of the

Scott utility module for Amerada Hess

off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland.

When it was completed two years later,

the Scott utility module was the largest

ever one-piece module completed at

that time in the Cadiz yard, weighing in

at a whopping 9,100 tons.

construction yard just three years

later in the Bay of Cádiz, a site that

was selected for its ability to cater to

offshore projects in a multitude of

locations including the North Sea,

Mediterranean Sea, and the Northern

and Western Coasts of Africa.

Over the next fifteen years, Draga-

dos Offshore expanded its international

projects, including seven offshore struc-

or Puerto Rico’s San Juan. It is in this

colorful port, in the neighboring city

of Puerto Real, that Dragados Offshore

makes its home.

And Cádiz itself isn’t the only one

with history. Founded in 1972, Dragados

Offshore initiated its operations with

the construction of Shell’s Amposta oil

field production platform in the calm

waters of the Spanish Mediterranean

Sea, just 22 kilometers south of the

meandering Ebro Delta in Northeastern

Spain. It was this very first project that

acted as a springboard for the company

who subsequently opened their first

CÁDIZ IS GENERALLY considered to

be the oldest continuously inhabited

settlement in Europe, founded by the

Phoenicians in about 1100 BC. Now well

into its fourth millennium, the ancient

center, surrounded almost entirely by

water, is a romantic jumble of sinuous

streets where Atlantic waves crash

against eroded sea walls, salty beaches

teem with sun-worshippers, and cheer-

ful taverns echo with the sounds of

cawing gulls and frying fish. Indeed,

the port itself, with its fortified sea

walls and crumbling military ruins, is

heavily reminiscent of Cuba’s Havana

Yard of Cadiz

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IN 1996 DRAGADOS Offshore got the

chance to work on one of the most

prestigious projects in Europe: the

fabrication of 49 steel-and-concrete

bridge spans for the Öresund Project, a

7 kilometer cable-stayed bridge linking

the cities of Copenhagen, Denmark and

Malmö, Sweden. The Öresund bridge

was later made internationally famous

as the lynchpin in Broen a Scandina-

vian crime drama television series that

has been shown in over 100 countries.

“Obviously, our focus is on fixed and

offshore gas platforms, jackets and top-

side modules for floating structures,”

assures Jeroen Poppe, Vice President of

Global Business Development and Cor-

porate Services for Dragados Offshore,

“but when this market is slow, we have

the ability to diversify into major civil

construction projects.” “We have also

entered the shallow water pipeline

work and, currently, our goal is to enter

into the renewable energy industry.”

But it wasn’t until the start of the 21st

century when Dragados Offshore exe-

cuted its major landmark projects so far,

between the Snøhvit project for Statoil

(2005), Europe’s first and only LNG liq-

uefaction plant, the Buzzard production

platform for Nexen (2006), the largest

DRAGADOS OFFSHORE AND SIF: BUILDING EXCELLENCE IN OFFSHORE PROJECTS

Sif, market leader in offshore tubulars for oil and gas plat-forms, delivered the four outer legs, four launch legs, and 24 piles for the Mariner platform jacket that was built by Draga-dos Offshore under contract to Statoil. Dragados and Sif have worked together frequently in the past, going all the way back to 1995. The Britannia Project in the United Kingdom, Ekofisk and Eldisk Main/Bridge in Norway, South Arne East/North in Denmark, and the Castor PUQ jacket in Spain are several of the offshore projects that were successfully com-pleted in recent years.

The two companies teamed up again to build the Mariner platform. Sif faced a major challenge making the jacket legs, due to their weight and complexity. But that challenge was faced head on and the project was completed with the usu-al Sif ‘quality on time’ mentality – a success formula that Dragados Offshore and Sif have in common.

www.sif-group.com/en

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subsidiary of Dragados Offshore, the

company opened a fabrication yard

in Tampico, on the south side of the

Panuco River in Pueblo Viejo, Veracruz,

which extended the company’s reach

into the Gulf of Mexico. The 350,000

square-meter facility was purpose-built

for the construction of offshore projects

and has more than 70,000 square-

meters of fabrication areas, including

workshops for boiler works, welding,

piping, and hydromechanics. From this

yard Dragados Offshore delivered last

year the impressive 10,000 ton high

pressure compression platform CA-

Litoral-A, which was the first ever float-

over installed platform in the Gulf of

Mexico, and is currently completing its

sister platform, the low pressure com-

pression platform CB-Litoral-A.

integrated deck built in Cádiz so far,

and the Adriatic LNG project (2008), the

worlds’ first LNG regasification facility on

top of a concrete Gravity Based Structure.

With over eighty projects delivered

worldwide, Dragados Offshore has made

a name for themselves as a leading

engineering, procurement, and con-

struction (EPC) contractor providing truly

impressive and comprehensive solutions

from concept to delivery including FEED

studies, detail design, construction,

transportation, commissioning, offshore

installation and hook-up of offshore

fixed platforms, offshore floating plat-

forms, offshore wind power, subsea

systems and shallow water pipelines,

onshore modular fabrication, and special

projects based on large steel structures

such as structural components for

bridges and dam gates.

In 1998, Dragados Offshore entered

the Mexican market through a partner-

ship with local contractors, to build a

gas compression complex, a move that

would turn out to be one of the single

greatest corporate strategies in the

long-running history of the company. It

led to three further EPC contracts with

PEMEX in 2001 and, in 2003, after the

official formation of a Mexican-based

Yard of Tampico

CA-Litoral CB-LITORAL-A

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our goal of working on more deep-water

projects because now we’re able to moor

floating structures, which we weren’t

able to do in the Tampico yard.” The stra-

tegic decision to acquire this new facility

was made not only to satisfy growing

demand in the local market, but also

to further target projects in the North

American and South American regions.

As such, Dragados Offshore Mexico has

recently signed a frame agreement with

Shell for the fabrication of both onshore

and offshore modules for the next

7 years, which is a major milestone in

achieving this target.

Recently, Dragados Offshore has

been teaming up with Statoil, a multi-

national oil and gas company head-

quartered in Stavanger, Norway. The

last completed project the two compa-

nies collaborated on was the $7 billion

Mariner oil field on the East Shetland

Platform of the UK North Sea, for which

Dragados built a behemoth a 22,400

ton, 134 meter high, jacket in their fab-

rication yard in Cádiz. On August 10th of

last year, the main tug “Skandi Iceman”

pulled the jacket safely into the channel

of Bahia Cadiz and began its 1,835-nau-

tical mile journey from southern Spain

to the Mariner field in the North Sea.

BUT, AS IS THE CASE with all rapidly-

growing companies, Dragados soon grew

out of their Tampico yard. In 2013, they

expanded their Mexican interests with

the addition of a second fabrication yard,

this one located nearby in Altamira. “The

Altamira yard was a logical expansion for

Dragados,” Poppe explains. “The Tampico

yard has certain limitations because it is

situated on a river and we have to cross

under a bridge which limits us in terms

of size. Altamira also helps us toward

Yard of Altamira

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PROSPECTORFILE installation of a Dragados–made 7,600

ton, 4-legged lifted accommodations

platform jacket in the summer of 2018.

With this contract, Dragados Offshore

has consolidated its position in the

market for North Sea EPC projects and

has expanded its reputation as a leader

in the development and execution of

offshore oil and gas contracts.

It hasn’t always been easy, however.

In the months preceding the recession,

when the price of oil tumbled from $150

a barrel to as low as $35, many major

projects were either stalled or post-

poned—a crisis that the company has

“We have developed a long-term

relationship with Statoil through the

various projects we have built for them

over the years,” Poppe says proudly.

“The recent jacket delivery for the Mari-

ner project was the most successful one

yet and it was partly because of our

work on Mariner that we were able to

secure the contract for the Johan Sver-

drup jacket as well, which is, I would

say, the largest on-going development

in Europe. We’re excited to be partici-

pating in it.” Johan Sverdrup, another

oil field in the North Sea, will see the

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selected to participate in these major

projects is an honor and delivering our

work on time and on budget to the

client’s satisfaction is hugely rewarding

and a source of great pride.”

ACCORDING TO POPPE, the most im-

portant factor contributing to Dragados

Offshore’s success in the EPC industry

is the people that are involved in the

projects—from the management team

all the way down to the workers in the

field. Because of this, Dragados’ main

focus is safety performance—an area

where they have experienced excellent

results in the last couple of years. “By

promoting employee awareness, we

are able to mitigate many workplace

health, safety, and environmental risks.

Our main objective is to achieve Zero

Accidents, to which end we continually

promote and establish a culture of per-

execution of these challenging projects

is to be able to execute and control the

design aspect, which is why Dragados

Offshore is in the midst of an ongoing

development to implement and grow

its in-house detail engineering capacity,

providing not only the required design

support for its EPC projects, but also

enabling execution of stand-alone

design projects, FEED studies and the

like. “At the end of the day, being

bounced back from quite impressively.

But still, the day-in-day-out challeng-

es of the industry provide enough

obstacles on their own. “The hardest

aspect of the EPC sector is definitely

the strict schedules that companies like

Dragados must meet—especially in the

offshore industry where firm installa-

tion windows usually determine project

deadlines,” Poppe confesses. One of the

major factors attributing to successful

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areas of focus as we look ahead to the

next three to five years,” Poppe admits.

“We’re also hoping to integrate our

Mexican and Spanish operations to be

able to provide an unprecedented level

of global engineering support. And with

oil prices fluctuating as they are and

the current state of the oil and gas in-

dustry, we’re also planning to continue

diversifying our business by increasing

our U.S.-targeted modular fabrication,

deep-water structure manufacturing,

renewable energy interests and pos-

sible entrances into markets such as

Brazil or the Middle East.” ▲

sonal responsibility and accountability

and offer thorough safety training to

our team members so that they have

the knowledge, tools, and resources to

prevent accidents.”

CÁDIZ AND DRAGADOS may both pose

a rich, vibrant history, but Dragados is

certainly not afraid to outgrow the nest

from which they flew—as is exhibited

in their impressive growth in Mexico.

But with offices in Houston, Texas as

well, they’ve got their sights set on

continuing to move north. “Expansion

in the United States is one our main

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PROSPECTORFILE