World's largest cable-laying vessel "Fleeming Jenkin" launched

The Belgian company Jan De Nul, a specialist in marine dredging and land reclamation, launched the cable-laying vessel "Fleeming Jenkin" on Tuesday in the CMHI Haimen shipyard in China's Jiangsu province, which it claims has the world's highest cable carrying capacity. The ship can carry more than 28,000 tons of subsea cable and can be used, for example, to connect offshore wind farms.

The "Fleeming Jenkin" is a total of 215 meters long and 40 meters wide. The ship is powered by four azimuth thrusters, each with an output of 2600 kW. The three bow thrusters each deliver 2100 kW, and the retractable propulsion power is twice 2600 kW.

Operation is via a hybrid power plant, including generators and a 2.5 MWh battery. The generators are powered by biofuel or green methanol. Jan De Nul points out that the drive significantly reduces the emissions of carbon dioxide CO₂ and nitrogen oxides NOx that are conventionally produced by diesel ships. It also has a dual exhaust system designed to remove nanoparticles. Accordingly, the "Fleeming Jenkin" is classified as an Ultra-Low Emission Vessel (ULEv), Jan De Nul writes.

High Cable Capacity

The ship has three huge cable drums. Two of them are located on deck, one below deck. The deck drums accommodate cables weighing 11,000 tons each, while the under-deck drum can carry cables up to 7500 tons. This is said to be the world's largest cable loading capacity for a cable-laying vessel. The cables are laid via laying wheels at depths of up to 3000 meters. Up to four cables can be laid simultaneously, as can be seen from from the ship's specifications (PDF). The maximum cable tension that can occur is up to 150 tons.

Once the ship's construction is complete and test voyages have been successful, the "Fleeming Jenkin" is scheduled to be deployed in Europe in 2026 to lay subsea cables for offshore wind farms. The first project is the connection of offshore wind farms for the transport of energy via four 2 GW connections commissioned by the Dutch-German grid operator TenneT. Typically, such connections have a capacity of only 700 to 900 MW.

In this project, the cable-laying vessel "Fleeming Jenkin" will initially lay subsea cables approximately 3000 km long over a distance of 773 km across the North Sea to connect offshore wind farms to the mainland.

(olb)