MOSCOW (MRC) -- The 488-meter-long hull of Shell’s Prelude floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) plant has been floated out of the dry dock at the Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) yard in Geoje, South Korea, where it is currently under construction, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing with reference to the company's statement.
Once complete, Prelude FLNG will be the largest floating facility ever built. It will unlock new energy resources offshore and produce approximately 3.6 million tpy of LNG to meet growing demand, according to the company.
FLNG will allow Shell to produce natural gas at sea, turn it into liquefied natural gas and then transfer it directly to the ships that will transport it to customers. It will enable the development of gas resources ranging from clusters of smaller more remote fields to potentially larger fields via multiple facilities where, for a range of reasons, an onshore development is not viable.
This can mean faster, cheaper, more flexible development and deployment strategies for resources that were previously uneconomic, or constrained by technical or other risks, according to the company.
Prelude FLNG is the first deployment of Shell’s FLNG technology and will operate in a remote basin around 475 kilometers north-east of Broome, Western Australia, for around 25 years. The facility will remain onsite during all weather events, the company says, having been designed to withstand a category 5 cyclone.
As MRC informed previously, Shell, one of the largest gas producers in the US, will build plants in Louisiana and Canada to produce liquefied natural gas as a fuel for heavy trucks and large ships. The company will build the facilities in Geismar, Louisiana, along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge, and in Sarnia, Ontario, on the southern shore of Lake Huron just east of Michigan. Each plant will be able to produce 250,000 tpy of LNG. The facilities are expected to take about three years to complete. The facilities will be relatively small compared with other natural gas liquefaction terminals around the world, such as those in Qatar, but they will represent a doubling of the liquefied-gas manufacturing capacity in the US and Canada.
Royal Dutch Shell, commonly known as Shell, is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors".
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