IT WILL be the longest floating vessel ever to ease its way out of a shipyard 鈥� 468 metres long, to be precise.
Oil giant Shell wants to exploit the Prelude gas field 475 kilometres north-east of Broome, Western Australia, by building a Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) plant. This 鈥渟tranded field鈥� is too far from land for a pipeline to connect an extraction rig to a gas liquefaction plant on shore, so Shell plans to combine the two at sea. 鈥淚n simple terms, the facility can be compared to an island with a liquid natural gas plant on it,鈥� says Shell鈥檚 Neil Gilmour.
鈥淚n simple terms, the facility can be compared to an island with a natural gas plant on it鈥�
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If built, the vessel will be 10 metres longer than the biggest supertanker ever, the Knock Nevis, scrapped in late 2009. Afloat, it will displace 600,000 tonnes of water 鈥� six times that displaced by the US Navy鈥檚 Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. No floating oil or gas rig come close to this.
Building such a vast vessel will be an engineering challenge, says Mark Lambert of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects in London. 鈥淚t鈥檚 feasible,鈥� he says, 鈥渂ut they will have to be very careful about how it flexes along its length if fatigue cracking is to be avoided.鈥�
If the Australian government gives the project the go-ahead after an environmental impact assessment, the vessel will be built in a Korean shipyard and then towed to the Prelude field, where Shell says it could be installed in 2015.
