The contract covers four tie-ins on the two parallel pipelines that will traverse the Baltic Sea, crossing Russian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and German waters. The subsea tie-in operations will be performed using the Statoil-operated Pipeline Repair System – comprising welding machines, installation structures and pipeline retrieval tools – and one of the diving support vessels from the company’s fleet, the Skandi Arctic.
Meanwhile, the pipelay vessel Castoro 6 has started its journey to the Baltic Sea where construction of the 1,224 km Nord Stream Pipeline will begin shortly.
Pipelaying activities will commence in the Swedish Exclusive Economic Zone, about 60 km off the coast of the Swedish island of Gotland, at a point located 675 km from the pipeline’s starting point near Vyborg, Russia, and 549 km from the end point at Lubmin near Greifswald, Germany.
The 48 inch diameter pipeline is scheduled to start transporting natural gas to Europe from 2011, while work on the second pipeline is scheduled to begin in mid-2012.
