MENCK GmbH: Transforming Offshore Pile Driving with 150 Years of Expertise

Driving collaboration

Since first appearing through the formation of MENCK & Hambrock in 1868, MENCK GmbH has become known for its outstanding levels of quality and reliability. During the early days of the business the company was primarily involved in the manufacture of large construction and excavation equipment and although MENCK has since left this market, some of this equipment continues to operate within the global construction arena. During the 1960s the company developed into the offshore environment, where it has developed a strong specialisation in pile driving equipment across several applications.

Throughout its history MENCK has established over four decades of proven capability relating to operation within the offshore market, which includes unprecedented engineering and project management knowledge coupled with an extensive service portfolio and supported by strong experience in pile driving. The company today operates as part of the Acteon group of companies, which is currently comprised of 25 individual businesses that link the seabed to surface across a broad range of disciplines. Within the foundations cluster of Acteon, the cluster companies including CIS, Core Grouting, LDD, LM Handling and MENCK collaborate to provide integrated shared services to clients within the civil, marine, renewable energy and oil & gas industry. This enables the business to offer an extensive and varied suite of subsea foundation services fully integrated within a single contract interface and managed through a single point of contact.

“This represents a relatively unique approach to the market where we take on greater risk directly and provide a single point of interface that is very efficient and much easier for the end user to employ. This modus operandi allows clients to work with several operating and service companies within a single framework rather than managing several separate contracts and sets of terms,” elaborates MENCK Managing Director, Fabian Hippe. “This is a highlystreamlined mode of operating that we have used across several projects in the past and one that we are keen to further develop while we do adopt and consider any of our client’s needs.”

MENCK was previously featured in Energy, Oil & Gas in July 2016, during which time Fabian discussed the company’s evolution from the production of excavation equipment to a business that provides specialist pile driving systems. These systems presently include hydraulic hammers that range from between 100kJ to 3500kJ in capacity. Indeed, during the company’s last appearance within the magazine Fabian elaborated on the successful delivery of the first of its MHU 3500S hydraulic hammers. This unit was used back in 2015 to assist Bilfinger Marine & Offshore Systems with the installation of monopile foundations for Vattenfall’s Project ‘Sandbank’, a new 72 strong turbine wind farm located in the North Sea.

During the past year MENCK has continued to develop its product portfolio and engage with clients across several applications, which has proven to be vital strategy while operating within the changing offshore and civil engineering environments. “In additional to retail units we also maintain a rental fleet of 28 pile driving hammers that are available in a range of capacities across the globe. We presently work out of our headquarters in Germany as well as from a workshop facility situated in Singapore,” Fabian says. “We enjoyed a very positive year during 2016 with large proportions of our business coming from within both the offshore and civil engineering markets. Our engagement in a variety of different markets supports us well despite the current downturn in the global oil and gas market. Indeed, some of the markets in which we operate are highly cyclical and can be extraordinarily busy during one year and much slower throughout the next.”

Despite the challenges that presently exist within the offshore market, MENCK continues to remain highly active through its activities within the arena of civil engineering where the company has completed several high-profile piling works. These works have included vital pile driving operations for the bridge pier foundations of the Padma bridge development in Bangladesh. “This project is supporting the construction of a multipurpose bridge across the Padma River in Bangladesh. Our client is a major Chinese installation contractor that has secured the main construction work for the project,” Fabian explains. “We are currently working on site with a single 2400kJ hydraulic pile driving system quite successfully, and have recently secured the supply for supplement equipment systems including our MHU 1900S and MHU 3500S pile driving spreads. The MHU 3500S is currently our most powerful hydraulic hammer which we do entertain multiple units of in our rental fleet.”

MENCK, together with its sister companies within the Acteon foundations cluster, jointly exhibited at the Offshore Wind Energy 2017 exhibition held in the ExCel London between June 06 and ´08 2017. Events such as these allow us to directly interact with new and existing, Fabian says, while promoting our highly collaborative problem solving solutions. “We offer upfront consultancy for our client’s foundation challenges not only relating to MENCK equipment, but focus on the overall techno-commercial viability for any foundation challenge. Through our collaboration and with the wider Acteon Group of companies supporting us as well we can offer the most intriguing solution to our clients while taking into account the challenges along the way. This helps us identify bottlenecks and the realisation of potential cost-savings that we can incorporate into the project. Naturally we prefer to work with clients to devise a solution before going on to execute the project, but we are also able to work according to pre-existing plans as required,” Fabian concludes. “We are continuously trying to improve our technology because we are working within an industry that faces ever new challenges. Particularly the impact on health and safety as well as environmental aspects is on the forefront of our attention. We are trying to minimise this impact to the largest extend possible. MENCK and LDD as part of the foundation cluster alongside with the Acteon Group company UTEC worked successfully on the ‘Wikinger’ wind farm in 2016 This was a very significant success in terms of services delivered as well as for our business internally. It is something that we will continue to expand on and would like to do more of in the future.”

MENCK and its sister companies of Acteon’s Foundations Cluster are looking forward to seeing clients in London.

MENCK GmbH
Services: Global pile driving services