At the INEOS Project ONE site in Belgium, one of Europe’s most ambitious petrochemical developments, Sarens is using Liebherr’s massive LR12500-1.0. This isn’t just any crane—it’s one of the largest and most powerful crawler cranes in the world, built to handle some of the heaviest lifting jobs in modern construction.
The LR12500-1.0 was built by Liebherr in Germany, with input from Sarens’ engineering team. It can lift up to 2,500 tonnes, which puts it in a league of its own. That kind of strength is exactly what’s needed for a project like this. The crane has been designed with a reinforced boom system, called PowerBoom, and a counterweight system that adds stability during massive lifts. It’s also built to be transported and assembled more efficiently than other cranes in its class, which helps save time and costs on site.
At the INEOS site, the crane is being used to install several large structures, including a splitter that weighs 635 tonnes and stretches nearly 100 metres in length. There’s also a flare stack going up—over 180 metres tall—that needs precise placement at a great height. Very few cranes in the world can handle this kind of task, but the LR12500-1.0 was built for it. Its boom and jib can be configured to reach over 200 metres, which gives it the flexibility to work on complex, high-altitude installations.
The crane itself is huge, even before the boom is attached. The crawler base measures more than 18 metres long and nearly 3 metres high. When fully assembled with the boom and jib, the crane becomes taller than two football fields stacked upright. Assembling it takes about three to four weeks on site. Every part has to be installed with care—nothing can be rushed with a machine of this size and complexity.
Once it’s up and running, the LR12500-1.0 handles the kind of lifts that smaller cranes simply can’t manage. Whether it’s lifting a massive splitter or placing a flare stack precisely at the top of a structure, the crane offers the power and stability needed to get the job done safely and efficiently.