Barges built in Harland & Wolff’s Belfast shipyard will soon be transporting waste from the heart of London after the shipyard bagged a major contract.
It has been awarded a £8.5 million contract to build 11 barges for waste management company Cory Group.
They will be used to transport the city of London’s recyclable and non-recyclable waste on the River Thames.
All of the barges will be fabricated at the company’s Belfast site, with four being built at the same time.
The first steel for the barges is due to be cut in around eight weeks’ time with the build due to be completed by mid 2023.
“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,” Harland & Wolff Group CEO John Wood said. “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.
The deal is the first for Harland and Wolff with Cory.
“I am delighted to have secured this contract with our new client, Cory Group, and look forward to working very closely with them to deliver on their new barge investment programme going forward.”
The fully fabricated barges will be sequentially delivered to Cory on the River Thames.
The latest contract win for the company sees it continue its revival after facing closure in 2019.
Then, it was bought out of administration by Infrastrata which also owns the Islandmagee gas storage project in County Antrim. Infrastrata also owns the Methil site in Fife, Scotland, and the Arnish site at the isle of Lewis and added the Appledore shipyard in north Devon to the group in August 2020.
