Our Complainer in Chief has been
saying big oil is making too much
money and implying they are evil.
We feel our president must know
nothing of the real cost of doing
business.
A big oil company has a source of over 3 trillion
cubic feet of natural gas about 200 miles off the
shores of Australia. Every day tankers go out to
the site empty and return to port full.
The gas is offloaded to a processing plant before
the finished product is once again loaded on the
tankers. Then it goes to customers.
There had to be a more economical way to do it.
After a few years, involving engineers from France,
Asia, and Australia, they came up with a solution.
Shell Oil will spend over $12 billion for the FLNG,
or Floating Liquid Natural Gas facility. When finished
it will be the largest ship in the world and six times
heavier than an aircraft carrier.
Shell will use the ship at the Prelude gas fields.
When the ship is finished in 2017, it will act as an
onsite processing plant. The finished product will
be loaded on tankers, onsite, then go directly to
customers.
Here’s some figures-
600 engineers worked on the facility’s design options
200 km will be the facility’s distance from the nearest
land
4 soccer fields, laid end to end, would be shorter than
the facility’s deck
Bow to stern the vessel will be about 1,500 meters long
(the distance from the bottom to the top of Chicago’s
Willis Tower)
175 Olympic-sized swimming pools could hold the same
amount of liquid as the facility’s storage tanks
6,700 horsepower will be the power of each of the three
thrusters used to steer the facility
50 million litres of cold water will be drawn from the
ocean every hour to help cool the natural gas
6 of the largest aircraft carriers would displace the
same amount of water as the facility
105 metres is the height of the turret that runs through
the facility, secured to the seabed by mooring lines
-162° Celsius is the temperature at which natural gas
turns into LNG
1/600 is the factor by which a volume of natural gas
shrinks when it is turned into LNG
117% of Hong Kong’s annual energy demand could be met by
the facility’s annual LNG production
25 years is the time the Prelude FLNG facility will stay
at the location to develop gas fields
For more on the project go here.
Comments are always welcome.