Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014
SEOUL, KOREA - SK Engineering & Construction has set out the drilling work for the Eurasian Tunnel project that will connect the European and the Asian part of Istanbul, Turkey. The contractor said on April 21 that it held an inauguration ceremony on the 19th in which Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and several other high-ranking Turkish government officials, as well as SK E&C executives including senior executive Suh Seok-jae were in attendance.
For the construction project, the gigantic 120-meter-long and 3,300-ton tunnel boring machine will be employed. The machine with the diameter of 13.7 meters is capable of advancing by an average of 7 meters a day from the Asian to the European side of the city. It will take 480 days for the machine to bore the 3.34-kilometer section of the 5.4-km tunnel.
The tunnel project calls for building a double-deck tunnel across the Bosphorus beneath the seabed at the total cost of US$1.24 billion. This is far by the largest construction project for Korean builders since Libya's Great Man-made River project. Instead of the usual EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) contract, SK E&C won the project under the BOT (build–operate–transfer) method.
The Eurasia Tunnel, whose foundations were cast in February 2011, will only service light vehicles such as cars and minibuses. The tunnel, which is expected to cut the 100-minute cross-strait journey time to 15 minutes, will not be accessible for trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians.