The Board of Royal Dutch Shell plc (Shell) has made the final investment decision on the Prelude Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) Project in Australia; the company will build the world’s first FLNG facility. Moored some 200km from the closest land in Australia, the FLNG facility will produce gas from offshore fields, and liquefy it onboard via cooling. The company will now begin detailed design and construction of what the facility will look like in a ship yard in South Korea. From bow to stern, the facility will be 488m long and when fully equipped with full storage tanks, it will weigh approximately 600,000tns. Around 260,000tns of that weight will consist of steel. The facility has been designed to withstand the severest cyclones.
Liquefied gas, chilled to minus 162 Celsius and shrunk in volume by 600 times, and other products will be offloaded by ocean-going LNG carriers directly from the facility out at sea for delivery to markets across the globe. The FLNG facility will tap approximately 3 trillion cubic feet equivalent of resources contained in the Prelude gas field and will remain permanently moored at the Prelude gas field for 25 years.
