Tendon construction for extreme water depths is too much to bear for engineering minds and budgets

While not technically impossible to use steel tendons beyond 5500 feet, the weight and cost of the tendons push the solution beyond most budgets with more steel being used for tendon construction than the host facility itself.

“Big tendons equal big steel,” says Erik Namvedt, president of FloaTec. “That’s why we’ve looked at composite tendons or adding buoyancy to the tendons to offset weight.”

Tendons