Placing pipelines at the bottom of the sea
It had to be possible to lay flexible and steel pipelines at sea depths of more than 3,000 metres. Not a problem for the J-Lay Loader, a handy system that picks up individual pipe sections from the deck and places them upright, after which the J-Lay module picks up the pipe and welds it to the pipeline in the making. J-Lay is a very pipe-friendly way of laying pipes as the pipe hardly bends at all. For this reason, it is often used for fatigue-sensitive applications, such as risers that connect the production platform to the pipeline at the bottom of the sea.