Contract leads to order for Northumberland firm

Jun 1 2010 by Iain Laing, The Journal

A LEADING North East engineering company has completed its largest order and shipped it off from Teesside to the Far East and is now looking at starting work on another contract just as big.

Northumberland firm IHC Engineering Business won a contract to design and build one of the world’s biggest, vessel mounted, pipe laying machines from Italy-based oil industry giant Saipem

The massive machine, which lays huge pipes to be used to carry oil, gas and water in the ocean bed, was created at the firm’s base in Port Clarence, Stockton, and over the weekend it was loaded on to a ship before being taken out of the River Tees yesterday.

The Riding Mill-based firm says that over the last three years the contract has put £25m into the North East economy and, and has supported over 500 jobs directly or in supply chain companies and now says it has won another order for a similar sized machine.

IHC Engineering Business managing director Toby Bailey said: “As one of only a handful of companies in the world active in the design and build of large capacity, complex J-Lay systems, we are immensely proud of this innovative system.

“This contract has certainly strengthened our reputation as a leading supplier of pipelay systems. To deliver it, we have made maximum use of our expanded resources together with the talents of the North of England supply chain. Designing and building this first of a kind system has been a remarkable achievement that we are very proud of.”

Saipem’s new deep sea pipe laying system will travel the world to lay pipe for large oil and gas companies such as Shell, Exxon and BP.

The machine is at 65 metres tall and 14 metres wide is taller than the Tyne Bridge, it weighs 2,500 tonnes, it carries 25km of cable, 5km of welding and designing it took 60,000 lines of software code.

Stockton North MP Alex Cunningham said: “This is a fantastic achievement.

“Our area is renowned for its world class engineering expertise, design and highly skilled workforce and it is this kind of project that has to be the future of manufacturing here and across the North East. We have to maintain such skills in the region as such projects bring jobs and money into the area and the businesses that support it.

“This weekend saw yet another milestone for engineering in my constituency and I look forward to many more similar projects and hopefully in time the creation of more highly skilled jobs.”

IHC Engineering Business was founded in 1997 by chairman and former chief executive Tony Trapp and partners who had worked with him at Tyneside subsea engineering firm SMD. He sold it two years ago for £30m to Dutch industrial giant IHC Merwede and it currently has a turnover of £27m and around 180 staff in Northumberland, Tyneside and Teesside.