Felbermayr Drives EU Energy Shift With Record Haul

By Simon West

Felbermayr has carried out one of its largest transport projects to date, delivering more than 34,000 freight tonnes of equipment for the conversion of Romania’s Mintia power station.

The yearlong project has involved about 1,600 packages, including three 380-ton generators from the U.S., 313-ton transformers from China and huge gas and steam turbines shipped from Germany.

Peter Niedermair-Auer, project manager of Felbermayr’s Wels project department, said the operation posed significant technical and logistical hurdles owing to Mintia’s location more than 250 kilometers from all navigable waterways.

“All core competences of the Felbermayr Group were called upon: Inland water transport, port transshipment, RoRo shipping capacity and road haulage,” the executive said.

Project planning took just under a year. The first significant components arrived in May and June 2024, with two gas turbines shipped in dismantled form from Berlin via Linz and Budapest, then onwards by low-loader to the site. Individual turbine pieces weighed as much as 150 tonnes and called for multiple lifts and eight separate transports per turbine.

Meanwhile, the steam turbine was shipped from Mühlheim in April this year and barged via Linz to Szeged, then dismantled and sent to Mintia in seven heavy transports. Its largest section weighed 150 tonnes and measured nearly 10 meters long and six meters wide.

“We had to overcome the usual challenges on Romanian and Hungarian roads, such as old bridges and narrow through-roads. We had to carry out a lot of structural calculations and route tests in advance,” Niedermair-Auer said. “The project would not have been possible in this way without the local support of Eszter Balog in Hungary and Marius Tudose in Romania.”

The most difficult move came earlier this year when one of the generators – weighing 770 tons with transport gear – was hauled 270 kilometers by road across Hungary into Romania. The operation, which required dismantling road signs, shoring up bridges and cutting trees, was the largest road haulage project ever undertaken in Hungary, according to Felbermayr.

The equipment will be installed at Mintia, where a former coal-fired facility is being rebuilt as a 1,700-megawatt gas and steam power plant. Once commissioned in 2026, it is expected to be the largest of its kind in the EU.

Felbermayr is an exhibitor at Breakbulk Europe.

Top photo: The SPMT rolled off the ship with the generator via the RoRo ramp and continued directly through the city of Mako to the transhipment point. Credit: Felbermayr