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This Giant Catamaran Plucks Old Oil Rigs Out of the Sea Like Daisies

Coming soon to a North Sea oil rig near you!

Footage has finally emerged of the Pieter Schelte, a two-hulled monster of a ship that will be used to pluck off-shore oil platforms out of the ocean in two giant pieces.

At over 1,250 feet long and 400 feet wide, the Pieter Schelte will be able to pluck 48,000 metric ton oil rig platforms like daisies from the garden.

The Pieter Schelte is the largest vessel of its type—at least until the next oil-platform harvester is built in 2020—and may technically be considered a catamaran.

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The ship gets its two hulls around an oil platform, then reaches out with its eight hydraulic clamps to grab the platform by the legs, which will have already been cut to prepare for decommissioning.

Next, the Pieter Schelte takes the topside of the oil platform off the legs with "a 2-meter rapid lift-off," and cart it off to be disassembled. It can even come back for the jacket, the steel frame that the topside sits on, and picks it up with similar ease.

This Youtube video has the highlights of how the Pieter Schelte will work, albeit, a bit grainily:

Concept videos of the Pieter Schelte in action are also available in higher quality on the website for AllSeas, the Swiss-based engineering group that built the vessel.

A better explanation of the Pieter Schelte's design might be found in this Lego version of the Pieter Schelte, the existence of which just goes to show how exciting this giant catamaran is, at least for one Dutchman, anyway. It also has better music:

The Pieter Schelte is still under construction in South Korea, but has already been signed up to remove three platforms from Shell's North Sea Brent oil field off the coast of Scotland starting in May 2015.

Lest you conclude that the construction of a $3 billion oil-platform plucking catamaran is a sign of the end of offshore drilling, I should point out that the Pieter Schelte can also install oil platforms and run pipeline. Also one of the appeals of lifting the jackets all at once is that they can be reused easier this way.

But before all that, the Pieter Schelte is going to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands at a top speed of 14 knots for its final phase of construction. A special pit will be dredged to accommodate the ship as its topside-lifting system is installed.

The Pieter Schelte has been in the works since 1987, according to AllSeas's website, and we're now just seven months away from seeing it in action. Oil rigs, you've been warned.