An initial contract for 11 barges has been awarded to boat builder Harland & Wolff.
The contract, worth £8.5 million (€9.9 million), is for 11 barges which will be used for transporting London’s rubbish up the River Thames.
The first steel will be cut in about two months’ time at the firm’s Belfast site, where four barges will be built in tandem with a target of mid-2023 for completion.
The contract has been awarded by Cory Group, a UK waste management and recycling company, which operates a river-based infrastructure on the Thames for delivering waste. Cory says that last year, 782,000 tonnes of non-recyclable waste was diverted from landfill and 532 GWh of baseload electricity generated under its waste management operations.
“With this material contract, we shall be opening up our vast undercover fabrication halls in Belfast and making optimal use of our new robotic welding panel line,” said Harland & Wolff CEO John Wood.
“This contract gives us the opportunity to optimise our production flows in readiness for other fabrication programmes in our pipeline and it demonstrates the variety of fabrication work that our facilities are ideally placed to execute upon.”
Harland & Wolff’s Belfast yard has deep water access and two of Europe’s largest drydocks. The company operates in the maritime and offshore undustry through the commercial, cruise and ferry, defence, energy and renewables markets.
