OMAN recently opened a dry dock complex in the Wilayat of Al Duqm in Al Wusta Governorate. The development is one of the vital projects implemented by the country’s Transport and Communications Ministry.

The dry dock within the Port of Duqm will specialise in maintaining and repairing vessels of various sizes, including oil and gas giant vessels of up to 600,000 tonnes. The project includes two dry docks each 410 m long, 14 m high and 10 m deep, and 95 m and 80 m wide, respectively.

This will be in addition to the construction of buildings, workshops and utilities necessary for operation, as well as 17 infrastructure projects, which include fixtures, equipment and operating machinery.

The Duqm port has more than 3,000-m-long berths. The capacity is expected to reach more than 3.5 million containers and is set to be expanded to 20 million containers, following completion of future expansion programmes.

State-owned Oman Dry Dock Company (ODC) is drawing up plans to add a floating dry dock to its world-class ship repair and maintenance yard within the port. The proposed facility will enable ODC to dry dock small and medium-sized vessels and thereby free up the yard’s two giant graving docks for larger ships, according to Dr Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Futaisi, the Transport and Communications Minister.

“We are hoping very soon we to start working on a floating dry dock within (ODC’s yard) so that we can maintain small-sized vessels that do not need to enter the dry dock itself,” he said.

Work on the floating dock is targeted for completion by early 2015.

M J Park, CEO of ODC, said: “While we focused on small and mid-sized ships last year, this year our focus has shifted to very large crude carriers (VLCCs), LNG tankers, large product tankers, and so on. We will continue to improve our maintenance and repair capacity.”