The Hindu Business Line : Lee & Muirhead bags transport contract for Sipat power project

LEE & Muirhead Ltd, the logistics service provider, has secured a contract for transportation of huge volumes of power generation equipment by road for the Sipat thermal power project in Chhattisgarh.

The equipment, mostly items such as boilers - all imported, will be supplied by Doosan Heavy Engineering of Korea. The port of Pusan in Korea will be the loading port and Visakhapatnam the unloading port. Upon unloading, the equipment will be transported by road from the port to the plant site.

The total volume of imports is estimated at 3,50,000 tonnes to be spread over a couple of years till 2007. The first consignment is to arrive in Visakhapatnam in January.

The bulk of the consignments will be transported over a distance of about 800 km and some heavy duty items over 1,100 km.

Lee & Muirhead was awarded the contract by L&T, which is the EPC (engineering, procurement & construction) contractor for the huge power project of a capacity of 660 MWx3.

Meanwhile, Lee & Muirhead has urged the Nuclear Power Corporation for an upward revision of the rates contracted earlier for handling the entire imported equipment for its Kudankulam project in Tamil Nadu.

Lee & Muirhead is responsible for the entire gamut of operations relating to ocean transportation, clearing and forwarding of equipment on arrival and inland transportation, partly by road and partly by the river route.

It finds the rates finalised more than two years ago "inadequate" in the context of the current market situation. Shipping freight rates and charter rates have been skyrocketing since then. Oil prices have shot up and the cost of road transportation too has become prohibitive.

For ocean transportation, Lee & Muirhead has teamed up with the London-based F S Bertling and with the Mumbai-based Resham Singh for road transportation.

An estimated 2,50,000 tonnes are to be imported from the Russian port St Petersburg for the Kudankulam project. Total imports will be spread over till 2007.

In the past one year, about 15 per cent of the equipment had arrived. Tuticorin is the unloading port. Earlier, there was a proposal to unload the consignments at Kudankulam jetty, specially built for the purpose. However, since the sea there is choppy, no ships can call at the jetty. As a result, the equipment, once unloaded, are carried by barges to the Kudankulam jetty for onward transportation by road.

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