Shell Is Building the World's Largest Man-Made Floating Object

[n2doc]

By Rebecca BoylePosted 05.20.2011 at 4:00 pm31 Comments

Shell's Prelude Floating Liquified Natural Gas Ship Royal Dutch Shell

Shell is making good on its promise to build the largest object ever to float on water, announcing Friday it would build the Prelude FLNG Project to harvest offshore natural gas fields. The gargantuan ship will suck up the equivalent of 110,000 barrels of oil per day.

The floating liquified natural gas facility will dwarf the biggest warships, weighing in at 600,000 metric tons. By contrast, the U.S.’ next-generation Ford-class supercarrier will displace 101,000 metric tons of water. Shell says its ship will be able to withstand a category 5 typhoon.


In some ways, it’s more of a mini-island than a ship, designed to be moored in the same spot off the northwest coast of Australia for 25 years. The facility will be one-third of a mile long — longer than five football fields laid end-to-end — and will contain 260,000 metric tons of steel, about five times the amount used to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The ship will chill the natural gas to -260° F to reduce its volume by 600 times, enabling it to be shipped to customers throughout Asia, according to Shell.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-05/harvest-natural-gas-ocean-shell-building-worlds-largest-man-made-floating-object

[shireen]

1. interesting technology

but i wonder if it could withstand typhoons and rogue waves.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

2. Shell says its ship will be able to withstand a category 5 typhoon.

[GliderGuider]

3. That's a picture of the end-times...

What does it say about the availability of fossil fuels whan something like this is seen as a good investment? Shell is willing to build something 6 times the size of a supercarrier to harvest a flow that amounts to less than 0.1% of the world's oil and gas consumption...

[txlibdem]

11. +1

Can you say "Peak Oil" anyone?

Thanks to that asshat Ronnie Raygun we are no where near prepared. Thanks for dismantling Pres. Carter's energy independence plan, asshat.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. YouTube has video (animation) of the proposed ship.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h8RP_aZzow

[CJvR]

5. It sure...

...dont look like something I would want to be on in a cat-5 storm. High as hell and in addition to the normal 1000 things that can go wrong on a regular ship you now also have the 10000 things that can go wrong in a chemical plant during an earthquake.

[pscot]

6. What could possibly go wrong......

[XemaSab]

7. Can you say "peak natural gas," boys and girls?

Also, floating a 4-foot long model in a swimming pool and splashing at it does nothing to instill confidence that the thing is seaworthy.

[intaglio]

9. Not interested in marine engineering, are you.

I don't like the thing; LNG is at best a stopgap and at worst will add hugely to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; but belittling marine engineers, their complex models and their rather sophisticated simulation tanks is just foolish.

The biggest threat to this vessel will be hogging, sagging and fatigue, things about which the marine certification agencies (insurers) will be very wary because they took a nasty hit from the failures of the MV Derbyshire and her sisters

[XemaSab]

10. I have more faith in computer modeling

than I do in the supposed sophistication of their scale model.

In short, I won't be shocked when the thing sinks in 10 years.

[FBaggins]

13. Can you elaborate?

What in the story do you associate with peak NG?

[intaglio]

14. Shell is spending $10 - $13bn on the ship alone

might indicate peak gas production is in their sights. Thats about $3bn per million tonnes of LNG ($3000 per tonne) plus exploration, drilling and shipping costs. As of 2010 LNG cost about $600 per tonne at wellhead and Yemen was selling at $198 per tonne to gain volume sales.

Source for cost of Shell "Prelude"

[FBaggins]

15. Prices are so low in the US because there's a glut of the stuff.

Would seem to be just the opposite of a "peak".

I point out that Simmons and the peak-oil-is-now crowd were saying several years ago that peak natural gas in the US was many years back... and have been proven clearly wrong.

[intaglio]

16. So Shell thinks they will lose $2,400 per tonne

Yeah, right

[FBaggins]

19. I'm afraid you've skipped a step.

If that was the price they were expecting, the "ship" would pay for iteself in the first year.

The article makes clear that the per-ton per-year price is consistent with other LNG projects.

[intaglio]

20. Now, how does a $12bn ship pay for itself in 1 year?

It still means that RDS are foreseeing a clear profit of $12bn. At 2010 prices the ship would have to liquefy, store and load 20 million tonnes of LNG in one year, nearly 55,000 tonnes per day (stored volume about 7500 cu m or 4.5 million cu m at ambient pressure) just to equal the price of the ship in the first year.

In addition to this Shell has to meet operating costs, interest payments, royalties and taxes ... you're talking bollocks again.

[FBaggins]

21. It doesn't... That was my point.

You compared a price/ton figure to a price/ton/year figure. At $3000/ton the first year's production would roughly equal the cost of the ship.

Of course those aren't the only costs... But it will operate for decades.

The point is that peak NG doesnt need to be close for it tomturn a big profit. The cited global averages would be quite profitable.

[intaglio]

24. But you said Shell would pay for the ship in the 1st year

So now the cost will not be paid back in the first year but over many years ...

Imagine that after maintenance, running costs, depreciation, royalties and taxes Shell makes $200 per tonne at a price of $600. This is probably a gross overestimate of profit

That means that, at 2010 prices, Shell has to produce and sell 60 million tonnes of LNG from this vessel unless the long price of LNG goes up by a large amount before it sees a penny of profit. As I indicated before Shell is foreseeing peak gas.

[FBaggins]

25. No... I didn't

I said "IF that was the price they were expecting"

You were the one who said that was the price they Needed to break even was $3,000/ton.

I merely pointed out that at that price... It would take a year to sell as much as the cost of the "ship".

The point was not that this was what they would get... But that you were Aron to think that it was what they needed or expected.

[kristopher]

18. My first impression from the headline was that this was the beginning of a nightmare...

One of the biggest threats looming on the climate change front is, in fact, the vast amount of methane that is sitting on the floors of the worlds oceans locked into ice structures. The fossil companies have been looking at this for a couple of decades and recovery hasn't been economical. When I saw the header my first thought was that they'd set their sights on these methane hydrates, and if they do, we're screwed on the climate change front. If warming continues though it won't matter because it will be released naturally. It is the potential knock-out punch in the global warming book of nightmares.

The existence of this "resource" means that the concept of a peak caused by resource depletion simply isn't in the cards for natural gas. There are economic constraints, but there is, unfortunately, not a depletion of resources anywhere on the horizon.

[FBaggins]

22. Yep. You're just about exactly right.

Didn't want to miss an opportunity to encourage you when you got one right. :)

[XemaSab]

23. The thing that I associate with a peak resource is that they're looking for it

in an unconventional way.

As surely as loggers have gone from the flat areas to the steep slopes, and as surely as oil drillers have gone from Bakersfield to 4,000 feet deep in the sea... creating massive ships and drilling for natural gas deep in the ocean is a sign of impending resource scarcity.

[FBaggins]

26. "Conventional" and "unconventional" change with time.

Whether or not it's a sign of coming scarcity really depends on how much becomes available due to the new technology. Setting objections about "fracking" aside, the new technique ("new" for this purpose anyway) obviously did exactly the opposite to scarcity concerns here in the U.S.

We went from building LNG import facilities and Palin trying to convince us that a new pipeline from Alaska was worth the many billions it would cost... to thinking of new LNG export facilities because we were making so much of the stuff that prices tumbled to a fraction of the world's average.

[GliderGuider]

27. It's all about net energy, baby.

The question is not so much the technology involved as the percentage of the recovered energy that has to be invested to extract the resource. Drilling in 4,000' of ocean takes a lot more energy than drilling in Ghawar. The EROI of oil and gas are dropping all the time, and the life of gas wells is shrinking as we drill smaller and smaller deposits. In addition, we become more and more accepting of the external costs because we need the resource so badly. They's why we can't set fracking "aside". Those are all signs of impending resource peaks.

Regarding Peak Gas, here's a look at the Canadian situation in an interview with David Hughes of the Geological Survey of Canada:

So, we have to drill 2-3 wells to get the initial productivity of a well that was drilled back in 1996. And you can see it in the overall drilling rates. In 1996, we drilled 4,000 successful gas wells. The price of gas spiked in 2001 - we drilled 11,000 gas wells. We've had about a 10% increase in productivity by drilling three times as many wells. 2003: even though we drilled 14,000 wells, gas production fell by about 3%. So, it basically hit a peak in 2001, maintained that plateau till mid-2002, declined 3% in 2003. We're now drilling nearly 16,000 gas wells per year, as of 2005, and production is about what it was back in 2002. Companies are talking about trimming their exploration budgets, which will play out as steeper declines in productivity. The other thing that's happening is coal bed methane. Particularly in Central Alberta, it's making up a larger and larger proportion of supply for very low productivity wells - 100 Mcf/day instead of, probably, a little over 250 Mcf/day for an average conventional well. So, we have to drill 2-3 coal bed methane wells to equal one existing conventional well. So, the writing's on the wall. We have to drill more and more wells each year - hopefully to stay flat - but, eventually, even to hold declines, to relatively small, incremental levels.

[progressoid]

8. Imagine of those man hours and money were funneled into renewable/green tech.

[txlibdem]

12. How many people could live on it if you took all the oil crap away and build apartments

This could be the solution for the people displaced by rising sea waters and global climate change.

/edit to add: it's 1/3 of a mile long!

[GliderGuider]

17. The collapsists talk about building "lifeboat communities", but

this is the first time I've seen someone propose using actual boats.

I wonder what the cost per square foot of such living space would be? Compared to transporting people at risk somewhere else and building traditional land-based communities for them.

[XemaSab]

28. Why has there never been a movie made of "Snow Crash?"

:shrug: