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 7.6tns of steel for the Prelude floating liquefied natural gas facility today, but in total, more than 260,000tns 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 488m long and 74m wide, making it the largest offshore floating facility ever built. When fully equipped and with its cargo tanks full, it will weigh more than 600,000tns. There will be over 3,000km of electrical and instrumentation cables on the FLNG facility, the distance from Barcelona to Moscow.
An expert team from Shell will manage the multi-year construction of the FLNG facility to ensure the Prelude project’s critical dimensions of safety, quality, cost and schedule are delivered. Strategic partners Technip and Samsung Heavy Industries (the Technip Samsung Consortium) along with SBM and hundreds of suppliers and contractors around the world are all contributing valuable knowledge, skills and equipment to help make the project a success.
