Today Shell celebrated the cutting of first steel for the game-changing Prelude floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility’s substructure with joint venture participants, Inpex and KOGAS, and lead contractor, the Technip Samsung Consortium, at Samsung Heavy Industries’ Geoje shipyard in South Korea.

Shell’s Projects & Technology Director Matthias Bichsel commented: “We are cutting 7.6 tonnes of steel for the Prelude floating liquefied natural gas facility today, but in total, more than 260,000 tonnes of steel will be fabricated and assembled for the facility. That’s around five times the amount of steel used to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Today’s ceremony marks a major milestone in this project, when the innovative thinking and new technology and engineering solutions which will make FLNG possible begin to be realised.”

When completed, the Prelude FLNG facility will be 488 metres long and 74 metres wide, making it the largest offshore floating facility ever built. When fully equipped and with its cargo tanks full, it will weigh more than 600,000 tonnes. There will be over 3,000 kilometres of electrical and instrumentation cables on the FLNG facility, the distance from Barcelona to Moscow.

Tags: Shell