Marine Drill for Vessel of Opportunity
A new marine drill called R30, designed and built by Fugro Seacore at its facility in Falmouth, UK, for the renewables market, will be featured on the Fugro Renewables stand (30A100) at EWEA Offshore in Frankfurt, Germany (to be held from 19 to 21 November 2013). Fugro Seacore’s design and engineering team was tasked with manufacturing a versatile modular drilling rig that could be rapidly mobilised onto a vessel of opportunity or one of Fugro’s survey vessels, whilst reducing or eliminating the HSE challenges encountered in offshore drilling operations.
The R30 marine drill was developed with a specification based on close analysis of the needs of the shallow water geotechnical market.
The R30 uses standard offshore drilling techniques where soil and rock boring equipment is deployed through the vessel’s moonpool using a top drive power swivel. The drill can deploy Fugro’s full suite of industry leading WISON sampling and CPT (cone penetration test) equipment and wireline geophysical logging tools. With a quick configuration change, Fugro Seacore’s advanced piggyback coring spread can be installed allowing deployment of the high quality Geobor-S coring system to obtain 102mm size core samples.
The R30 drill rig spread includes a fixed telescopic folding derrick rig, mud mixing and pumping unit, as well as other tools and ancillary equipment for geotechnical drilling operations. A hard-tied heave motion compensator is fitted to the power swivel to ensure the drill bit maintains a uniform pressure during standard API drilling operations. A shallow gas kick mitigation spread, automated pipe handling and anti-slingshot system are also included to increase operational safety of the drill rig. For all operations an ample supply of drilling mud, a spare string of drill pipe, sufficient spare parts and other supplies required to avoid delays will be available.
