The largest equipment for Nornickel’s flagship environmental programme — massive heat exchangers — has reached the Arctic seaport of Dudinka. Vast in scale and cost, Nornickel’s Sulphur Programme will make sure sulphur dioxide emissions in Norilsk, Russia’s northernmost city, are down 90% after 2025. The first six shell-and-tube heat exchangers for the sulphuric acid production section arrived at the Dudinka Port in full factory readiness. They were manufactured by the Komsomolets Machine-Building Plant in Tambov on Nornickel’s special request in a tight timeframe. The disassembled heat exchangers, each weighing almost 200 tonnes, were transported to St. Petersburg, where they were assembled and tested at a special site. The 19-meter-long units were delivered to Dudinka by an ice-class vessel. The whole journey took about 30 days.
The unloading and transportation of the heat exchangers were handled by a logistics company Mammut Rus, which has a unique experience, a fleet of equipment, and personnel. Two Liebherr cranes with a total lifting capacity of over a thousand tonnes were mobilised to unload the equipment at Dudinka port. Weather permitting, not more than two heat exchangers a day are planned to be unloaded. They are loaded onto self-propelled modular platforms that are used to transport massive objects such as industrial machinery, bridge sections, ships, and other objects.