Shell Leads LNG Competitors Out to Sea With Biggest Ship: Energy
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-19/shell-leads-lng-competitors-out-to-sea-with-biggest-ship-energy.html
For more than a decade, the worlds biggest liquefied natural gas producers led by Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) plotted how to move their $170 billion industry onto barges at sea to tap remote fields. Now theyre finally doing it.
Shell will forge the hull of a floating LNG plant in South Korea by year-end that will be the worlds largest vessel, weighing six times the biggest aircraft carrier, a Nimitz-class warship. Some 5,000 workers will build the factory to produce LNG off Australias northwest coast in a $13 billion project that also will shield Shell from escalating costs it would have to pay at the countrys onshore plants.
Rivals from Malaysias Petroliam Nasional Bhd. to GDF Suez SA of France likewise want to compress gas into liquid at sea, where many of the largest finds were made in the last decade. Its a generational change for a land-based industry that started about 50 years ago in Algeria, where Shell provided technology for Camel, the first commercial LNG plant. Today those facilities typically cost at least $20 billion to build.
We remove the need for the pipeline and use about 50 percent of the raw materials for an equivalent onshore plant, said Neil Gilmour, Shells FLNG general manager. Hes overseeing construction of the worlds first floating LNG vessel, which will be as long as the Empire State Building, for use by the Prelude venture partners.