Dancing Towers on Hamburg's Reeperbahn - Putzmeister

On site On site
Russia – vast country,
long journey: 9,000 km
by train to the site
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In March of this year, a brand new M 6 -6
travelled over 9,000 kilometres on the
Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to
Vladivostok.
The customer – Stroitel’nyi Aljans – is currently
using this long-reach boom pump 180
km away in Nakhodka, a port city on the Pacifi
c coast of the Russian Far East. Together
with its older brother – an M 44-5 that was
manufactured in 1996 and that Stroitel’nyi
Aljans acquired second-hand from Japan in
2004 – the M 62-6 is concreting the base of
a large oil platform.
t Well lashed – in Moscow, the M 6 -6
commences its long journey to the far
east with the Trans-Siberian Railway.
q In the port city of Nakhodka, the
M 6 -6 and M 44-5 together are pumping
a total of 55,000 cubic metres of
concrete for an oil platform.
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This GBS – Gravity Based Structure – consists
of a concrete slab that has an area of
approximately 100 x 127 m and is 13 m
thick and on which four shaft towers – 25 m
in dia meter and 41 m high – will be erected.
The complete structure will be concreted on
land and will then be towed by ship to an oil
fi eld just off the coast of the island of Sakhalin
and, from there, it will be lowered to the
seabed at a depth of 35 m. The client is the
Norwegian company Aker Solutions.
In total, the two Putzmeister pumps will
place 55,000 cubic metres of concrete before
the end of 2011. ■
‚ www.sakhalin.ru/engl/
Information about Russia‘s largest
island (engl.)
‚ www.sakhalin1.com/en/
Information about the oil and gas
development of Sakhalin-1 (engl.)
‚ www.waytorussia.net
Written and researched by the locals,
“Way to Russia” is a very popular independent
guide to Russia online (engl.)
Sakhalin – affectionately named “the wild
dishevelled animal” in the language of the
indigenous people – is 948 km long and between
27 and 160 km wide and is situated to
the north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido
in the Pacifi c.
With 650,000 inhabitants, this is Russia‘s
biggest island and only 3,150 of these inhabitants
belong to the indigenous groups of the
Nivkh, Nani, Orok and Evenki. They live selfsuffi
ciently, as fi shermen, as herdsmen or by
collecting wild plants.
Ceded to the Russian Empire in 1875, the
south of the island was ruled by Japan from
1905 until 1945. The few remaining indige-
Vast oil and gas reserves
in the Russian Far East
An area just off the coast of the island of
Sakhalin in the far north-east of Russia
is said to contain the largest untapped reserves
of oil and gas in the world. In oil
alone, it is estimated that there are 13 billion
barrels in this area.
The Arkutun-Dagi fi eld – part of the
Sakhalin-1 project and the future site of
use for the GBS that is currently under
construction in Nakhodka – is located
only a few kilometres off the coast of Sakhalin.
The US oil company Exxon-Mobil is
investing about 12 billion US dollars in
the development of the three oil and gas
fi elds (in total), amounting to the largest
direct investment by a foreign company
in Russia to date. Approximately 13,000
jobs have been created (directly and indi-
nous people were forced to leave their homeland
and travel in the direction of Hokkaido.
Since the 19th century, the island had been
used as a penal colony for Russian prisoners.
The inhabitants who live there today – except
for those who immigrated as a result of
the raw materials boom – are descendants of
the former forced labourers.
With approximately 175,000 inhabitants,
the island‘s capital Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is
the largest city on the island. However, most
of Sakhalin is made up of largely untouched
boreal forest or mountains and has a population
density of 6.2 inhabitants per square
metre – half as much as in Norway.
Sakhalin – Сахалин
rectly) from the development of these raw
material reserves and the tax revenue for
the region has doubled. The island has the
highest proportion of foreign nationals of
all the Russian regions and an above-average
share of English-speaking Russians.
Sakhalin is currently trying to fi nd a balance
between becoming an ambitious economic
region and nature resort, between tourism
ambitions and the threat of damage to the
environment.
q (from left to right) Cape Tihii (“Quiet
Cape”) in the Sea of Okhotsk · Nivkh
hunters in their traditional dress · The
state museum in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk
provides evidence of the former Japanese
reign · The island of Zametny in the
Tihaya Bay
14 PM 4307 GB PM 4307 GB 15
China
North Korea
Nakhodka
Sea of Okhotsk
Hokkaido
Russia
Sakhalin
Arctic Ocean
Arkutun-Dagi
oil and natural
gas fi eld
Kamchatka
Peninsula
Kuril Islands
Pazifi c Ocean
27 28 29 30
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