1,200-tonne column upended at Pluto Train 2 in Australia

Tailing crane and tower lift system in tandem

The lift was executed by Alevro, the engineering joint venture between Fagioli and Australian contractor Monadelphous, working with Bechtel. The heavies removal column (HRC) is one of the largest single items on the Pluto Train 2 site: 42.6 metres tall and 1,200 tonnes, it now dominates the plant skyline.

Rather than attempting the pick with crawler cranes alone, the team used a tower lift system to take the main load, with the 1,600-tonne crawler crane handling the operation alongside it. The upending itself took eleven hours from start to finish.

A year of engineering before the lift

Planning began more than a year in advance and absorbed over 3,000 hours of engineering. Much of that went into adapting the tower lift system to the specific geometry and load case of this column, and into demonstrating compliance with Australian Standards and local regulations — a step that routinely governs the programme on Australian resource projects, where imported lifting systems have to be shown to satisfy domestic design rules.

Tower lift systems occupy a useful middle ground on projects such as this. They can place very heavy loads at height without the ground preparation and assembly area a crawler crane of equivalent capacity would need, and they can be erected inside a congested plant layout where a large crawler could not track. The penalty is that they lift essentially vertically, so the load has to be delivered to a fixed point and the tailing operation has to be handled by a separate machine.

Global mobilisation

Equipment for the operation was mobilised from several countries, and the sequence on the day required close coordination between the tower lift system crew, the crawler crane crew and the installation team receiving the column on its foundation. Upending a slender vessel of this height is the point at which load distribution between the lifting system and the tailing crane changes continuously, so the rigging arrangement and the rate of travel have to be matched throughout.

Installation of the HRC was flagged by the parties as a major milestone in the progress of Pluto Train 2.