VAN OORD STRENGTHENS POSITION IN CASPIAN SEA REGION

In December 2015 Van Oord announced new dredging contracts in Kazakhstan’s Cas-pian Sea region with a total value of more than US $500 million. The first project will be the dredging of a 68-kilometer-long (42.5 miles) access channel to a new cargo offloading facil-ity to be operated by TenizService. Four cutter suction dredges are removing a total of some 17 million cubic meters (22.2 million cubic yards) of soil in shallow water. The project will en-able the expansion of the Prorva Port to help facilitate the growth of Kazakhstan’s oil and gas industry. In the second project Van Oord is performing the preparatory work for the instal-lation of two pipelines in the same region. This project involves excavating and backfilling two eight-kilometer-long (five-mile) trenches. In addition Van Oord is dredging an access chan-nel and will level the seabed.