BELFAST shipyard owner Harland & Wolff Group Holdings has been awarded an additional contract to manufacture 12 barges for the Cory Group.

The deal, worth around £9.6 million for Cory subsidiary Riverside Energy Park Limited, comes just over a month after the shipyard landed an £8.5m contract with the same firm for the fabrication of 11 barges.

The barges will be used to transport recyclable and non-recyclable waste on the River Thames.

Harland & Wolff said the contract will be subject to Cory reaching financial close on its ‘Riverside 2' development, which will include an energy from waste (EfW) facility.

Built to handle 655,000 tonnes of non-recyclable waste from London each year, it will sit close to Cory's existing EfW facility and will be one of the largest in the UK.

H&W confirmed fabrication will again take place at its Belfast site.

It follows a number of major contracts landed by the shipbuilder at sites in Devon and Scotland.

A lucrative £55 million contract to regenerate a former Royal Navy mine-hunting vessel was announced last week for H&W's Appledore facility, while a major wind turbine deal was secured last year for the H&W Methil workforce on the east coast of Scotland.

The shipyard owner said work on the £9.6m contract will begin towards the end of the fabrication programme for the first set of 11 barges, announced on June 1.

H&W said a production line has been set up at the Belfast facility to “provide seamless delivery” of the 23 barges in total.

Group chief executive John Wood, said: "We are pleased that Cory has once again chosen Harland & Wolff to fabricate these new barges.

“Fabrication facilities require a constant stream of work in order to create economies of scale and derive operational efficiencies.

“We have set up a semi-automated production line for the first Cory contract and with the award of the second contract, we will be able to drive through further efficiencies in the fabrication process."

In a trading update, the group said revenues from the additional Cory contract are expected to be delivered in the 2023 financial year, bringing the group's contracted revenues for that year to around £40m.

H&W said it continues to trade in line with market expectations for the current financial year.