REGION REPORT | AFRICA


“EnerMech has already established many successful partnerships across Africa and there is a lot of new activity in Mozambique. I am confident the company’s expertise and track record in local content development will help us develop a sustainable business, building a solid pipeline of new work across the local energy sector,” says Maússe. The company has secured its first contract providing subsea pre- commissioning services on the Coral South Floating Liquified Natural Gas (FLNG) development. Located in Area 4 of the Rovuma Basin, Coral South is Africa’s first FLNG project and it will be the world’s first ultra-deep-water FLNG facility to operate at water depth of 2,000m. “The award is highly significant for


EnerMech as we look to support the development of the world’s first ultra- deep-water FLNG facility, one of several large developments planned offshore Mozambique,” says Ross McHardy, regional director, Europe and Africa, EnerMech. “Mozambique is fortunate to hold vast


natural resources and minerals and with the pace of oil and gas activity in the country, we were eager to engage with and develop the local energy supply chain. With emerging opportunities within large infrastructure projects, we have identified the country as core to our future growth in the continent.” According to Condra’s Kleiner, the African


market is going to continue to evolve through cyclical demand for commodities, especially minerals and especially from China. That said, Africa’s challenge is going to be to resist the temptation to nationalise mining interests, which is counterproductive to meeting that demand. “I would like to see easier access to


some of the newer mines, which are often remote. The infrastructure in some places is not good. An example is an enquiry recently received from a mine in Cameroon, where access for the abnormal-load vehicles usually used to transport the crane girders is inadequate. These vehicles cannot navigate the existing road. So, the only way to deliver that crane will be to design everything for containerisation, including girders of almost 30 metres. The girders will have to be spliced and bolted together on site,” he adds. The company has just started


manufacturing eight coil-handling cranes for a new South African vehicle plant. Further afield, it is manufacturing a 60-ton overhead crane and a portal crane for Botswana, both to be delivered towards


R Jaso is looking for more distributors in Africa.


the end of this year. It is also supplying a crane to Bulyanhulu gold mine in Tanzania, where it supplied many of the initial cranes needed at the time of mine development. “Africa could do better by realising that


it is Africa and not Europe. By this I mean that some of the electronic refinements demanded by the customer are not well suited to the power outages and fluctuations that are typically African. That said, we continue of course to give the customer what he wants, while engineering it to be as immune to these problems as possible,” says Kleiner. “Some years back we experimented with undercutting, but we have realised that we don’t want to compete against cheap products. We invest far too much in the Condra product to try to undercut. Our success bears out the fact that if a customer knows what he wants and has experience of other manufacturers, he will come to Condra. Many don’t only come to Condra once. They come back as repeat customers, and this has gradually given us more of the world market as well as the African market. Our growth into Canada and Australia has been largely based on people who have previously experienced the robust reliability of our products and insisted on Condra.” Another of its recent projects is deliveries


of customised cranes for injection- moulding and shipboard maintenance applications with a third overhead machine of unusual design, sporting an exceptionally wide span of no less than 35 metres. A span of this magnitude is more than


double the average of 15 metres and approaches the manufacturer’s record of 42 metres. Not only is Condra’s newly completed


crane unusually wide, but it is also large from an overall perspective, with box girders the height of an average man, and a 20 ton two-speed hoist mounted on a 7 metre-wide crab with a wheel base of six metres. A working platform of open-grid walkway and solid-forge handrail runs the full length of the machine. The crane will be delivered to a platinum concentrator for maintenance duty. Weighing in at 33,3 tons, it has a lifting height of 18,7 metres and is controlled remotely by radio. There is a pendant back up. During the crane’s design phase, the very


large size of the machine dictated careful consideration of wind loading. Condra’s engineers included the company’s patented storm brake to counter wind forces anticipated at the installation site. The storm brake is activated by anemometers in two stages, the first sounding a siren when the wind speed reaches 30 km/h, and the second automatically engaging the brake at a wind speed of 50 km/h. At this point, any crane operation is de-activated and the machine automatically secured against all movement. Condra completed final assembly, alignment and testing of the concentrator maintenance crane in the last week of March. No less than 260m2 of factory floor space was set aside for this phase of manufacture.


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