Splitbarges? 

Ever found it difficult to explain to people what you do for a living? 

The response of ‘specialist shipbroker’ normally leaves people with a blank expression. Shipbroker is hard enough – but specialist shipbroker within a niche market is even more baffling to your average Jo.

Those familiar with the term ‘shipbroker’ usually think of cargoes rather than ships; dry cargo vessels or tankers rather than marine construction vessels or dredgers; voyage charters rather than sale & purchase or charter.

My solution is to offer the analogy of a head-hunter and say we are on the hunt for vessels rather than for people. As a broker you need to understand the project details, the vessel’s capabilities, certification, and the work location and all these must combine with availability and timing to be able to offer the ‘right candidate for the role’.

And ‘what about the type of vessels you handle?’, my conversation partner asks at the summer BBQ or networking event…

I tell them the vessels we deal with are ‘non-conventional’ or ‘not what you’d think of’.

For instance, using layman’s terminology, flat barges with legs that stand above the water (= jackups); underwater vacuum cleaners (= suction dredgers), and last but not least, the most extraordinary of all, a hold barge whose bottom opens up, leaving an enormous gaping hole, yet doesn’t sink – the truly unsinkable ship that Titanic never was – (= split hopper barges, splitbarges, or dump scows (American)).

Splitbarge Projects

It’s this weird and wonderful vessel type that has kept us particularly busy of late.

As owners of splitbarges will testify, their market can be boom-and-bust! Years sitting idle, and then a sudden rush when everyone needs one. Such a BOOM period has been arriving for a couple of years now.

Used as receptacles for material dredged by backhoe and cutter suction dredgers, and to move and dump rocks and stones on breakwaters and backfill trenches for cabling projects in offshore wind projects, splitbarges have been in high demand in Europe.

The Femern Belt Project on its own (the longest submerged tunnel ever connecting Denmark and Germany) is said to have had more than a dozen large splitbarges on charter at one time.

The median splitbarges in Europe, however, date back to the 1970s. The most common self-propelled units, with a 1,000 m³ capacity, were built specifically for the project to construct the Danube-Black Sea Canal at the behest of Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu. Refurbished and sometimes re-engined, these units live on, and somehow through inertia or lack of imagination in the industry, very few modern equivalents have been delivered to replace them… So they continue to load and dump rock on breakwater projects.

Splitbarges as Auxiliary Equipment

Maybe it is the fact that splitbarges tend to play a secondary role as support for larger, more expensive pieces of equipment (like backhoe dredgers and cutters) that they are often not at the back of the queue in terms of priorities in dredging companies in a newbuilding or fleet renewal program – and as an afterthought, are often neglected or even overlooked?

In the rest of the world splitbarges have found different uses as a standard piece of auxiliary equipment to unload trailing suction hopper dredgers – often functionally replacing the bow connection with a dredge pipe used to pump it ashore.

In SE Asia / Far East

China’s assertion of control over the South China Sea has led it to withholding export licenses for dredging equipment destined for other countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan.

This has caused these countries to scour the Middle East and Far East for non-Chinese dredging equipment, including split barges. It has also meant a nervousness about building in China, which for this reason is increasingly considered an unreliable partner.

In Europe

For some buyers, the larger splitbarges offer an inexpensive way to acquire a trailer suction hopper dredger. Many of these units have been retrofitted with stock piping and pumps from the market, creating a shallow draft, versatile (and affordable!) splithopper dredger.

Our brokerage

For DSB Offshore Ltd, this has represented a boom in the sale of second-hand units.

Recent sales include:

• Non-propelled splitbarges (2 units) of cap 1,100m3 from Panama to Netherlands
• Non-propelled splitbarge of cap. 900m3 from Netherlands to Norway
• Self-propelled splitbarges (two units) of cap 1,200m3 from Portugal to Turkey
• Non-propelled splitbarges (2 units) of cap. 450m3 from Netherlands to Canada
• Large splitbarge of cap. 1,500m3 from Djibouti to Saudi Arabia
• S/propelled splitbarge of cap. 500m3 from Faeroes to UK
• Non-propelled splitbarge of cap. 1,000m3 from Panama to Guyana

The most recent sale, the largest capacity of all, was of the 2,000 m³ self-propelled split barge, ‘Verrazzano 1800‘, which was delivered to Polish buyers with DSB acting as the Seller’s (Jan De Nul) exclusive broker.

Here she is arriving in Poland last weekend (28 May 2025), under tow by a tug, arranged by DSB.

If the market holds, we should expect to see the beginning of a period of newbuilding of splitbarges, particularly of self-propelled units.

But who will take the plunge and start the process?