About 60 miles from downtown Houston, Texas, Freeport is one of the fastest growing ports on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Currently, it is undergoing expansion works that will open the state to even larger vessels. In this phase of the project, Berth 7 of the Velasco Terminal is being refurbished to make it the deepest container terminal on the Texas coast.
Berth 8 is being built to gain additional terminal length to accommodate vessels from Panamax to Post-Panamax class.
Working in cooperation with McCarthy Building Companies and the engineering company Moffatt and Nichol, ShibataFenderTeam (SFT) designed and manufactured 43 sets of SPC Cone Fenders Systems, each consisting of one Cone Fender (SPC 1400 G2.4) and a closed-box panel (2300×5450 mm) with UHMW-PE pads. Of these 43 systems, 27 were installed at Berth 8 and the other 16 at Berth 7. The order scope also included 29 T Head Bollards (150 tonnes).
The project’s particularity was twofold. On the one hand, when a new berth is built next to an existing one, every effort is made to have the same fender design on both berths as that makes maintenance, spare parts purchasing and the interchangeability of fender system along both berths easier. On the other hand, there was the challenge that the berthing line of berth seven was not straight, which posed additional design demand.
In a first step, the old fenders of berth seven were removed and then, our in-house engineering team proposed a customized solution to compensate for the variations in the quay wall: they added steel spacers, each in different heights, to be installed to each of the berth seven fenders.
Now, existing berth seven and new berth eight operate with basically the same fender system and have an even berthing line to safely accommodate larger vessels.
SFT’s holistic approach to fender system design considers project conditions, operational requirements, as well as all system components and their manufacturing process. The ShibataFenderTeam Group is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany with five regional offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia and a production facility in Germany
