Hamburg - SAL brings together complex heavy lift shipping and installation support into one specialist team. SAL announced its next steps as a leading heavy lift project carrier and marine installation provider. Today SAL is launching its Marine Projects department, a team dedicated to complex heavy lift shipping and marine installation support. The team will be headed by Sune Thorleifsson (Head of Projects) who explains: “Ma- rine Projects is a natural evolution of services for which SAL is already well known. For more than 35 years SAL has pushed benchmarks as a heavy lift carrier and in re- cent years we have increasingly supported marine installation and decommission projects with our unique heavy lift vessels. With Marine Projects, we work with com- plex transport and / or installation services including DP on a uniform platform.” Marine Projects is based in the SAL headquarters in Hamburg as an integrated part of SAL Heavy Lift GmbH. In addition, a new branch office will be established in Rot- terdam where Erik ter Horst, Matthieu Moerman and Michiel Rijkaert – all of whom are well known in the Benelux region as offshore specialists – will be based. This of- fice will be fully integrated into Marine Projects. Aside from Sune Thorleifsson also Julia Wildt and Mike Grant will be part of the team, who together have more than 60 years of experience in serving oil & gas, re- newables, salvage and civil work projects. Erik ter Horst, Senior Project Engineer adds; “I am very excited to be part of this team. SAL has a unique offering to the market – we have the most cost efficient DP2 vessel in the market, boosting some 7500m2 cargo storage area, a combined lift ca- pacity of up to 2000t and capable of transiting with 20kn. We can combine shipping solutions and installation support or offering our vessels as asset charter – a truly flexible service offering to our customer”. Marine Projects will encompass the entire fleet of SAL, and will work with customers across all industries and add to the already existing long track record of marine trans- portation and installation support. Sune Thorleifsson states: “We are essentially back to our roots as a one stop shop. We are a heavy lift specialist offering a diversified portfolio of services. Whether you need decommissioning support as we showed with our engagement in the Costa Concordia salvage operations, installation of offshore structures as we showed with Kitchen Light Unit III project or complex project shipping as just undertaken with the Walney Extension Project, SAL and the Marine Projects team are here to help”.