Flintstone
The 'Flintstone' is a deepwater fall pipe vessel and has been designed for rock installation operations in water depths up to 2,000 m. Carrying an Ice Class notation, the vessel can operate under the most extreme conditions.
Primary Specifications
Additional Data
Ship history
Ulstein Design & Solutions BV designed the vessel. On April 28, 2010, the fall pipe rock dumping vessel Flintstone was launched at the Sembawang Shipyard Singapore for Tideway, a Dutch offshore specialist in the oil and gas industry and a subsidiary of Belgium’s DEME Group. Tideway focuses on dredging and constructing landfalls for oil and gas pipelines and protecting and stabilizing them with precise rock placement at great depths.
Fallpipe vessels, like the Flintstone, are specialised ships that place graded rock on pipelines or the seabed through a fallpipe controlled by a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). The Flintstone can place rocks at depths up to 2,000 metres. This surpassed the previous record of 987 metres set by Tideway’s Rollingstone. It also has an Ice Class notation, allowing it to operate in extreme conditions.
Equipped with Dynamic Positioning (DP 2), the Flintstone can also serve as a multi-purpose vessel for tasks like cable laying and deep-sea mining. Built under Lloyds Environmental Protection Code, it incorporates energy-saving measures and minimizes NOx emissions. Constructed by Sembawang Shipyard, the vessel involved 2.5 million hours of work without injuries. Key subcontractors included Huisman, Seatools, Imtech, Rolls Royce, IHC Mining, and Kongsberg. The Flintstone’s first assignment was with Sevmash for the Prirazlomnaya Platform in the Barents Sea.