There was a time when flings (insert personal contextual experience) used to be simple, impromptu, largely trivial things seeking instant gratification. That was until Shell’s Floating Liquid Natural Gas facility, or FLiNG, came along: currently being built in the South Korean shipyards (largely unoccupied in the past several years after a surge in dry bulk container ship construction left the industry with a massive inventory glut and little demand for its precision engineering), this behemoth of a ship, measuring nearly half a kilometer in length, and displacing 600,000 tonnes of water, will be the world’s largest offshore floating facility when deployed 200 km off the north-west coast of Australia in 2017 to process the recently discovered Prelude and Concerto gas fields. It will also likely revolutionize the field of Liquified Natural Gas extraction.
Natural gas is one of the cleanest burning fossil fuels, in relative abundance, extremely versatile and energy rich, and in a world in which reliance on foreign crude, much of in inhospitable hands, will likely play an ever greater role in energy production. It is also very “green”, as it consumes less fresh water and takes up less land per unit of energy delivered. Yet one of the historical drawbacks is that traditional transportation options are limited, and extraction facilities are very bulky and complex, highly engineered and not geared toward deep sea exploration where environmental and extraction costs are prohibitive, requiring subsea pipelines traveling hundreds of kilometers to a mainland LNG facility, thus curbing one of the largest potential sources of natural gas in the world: those located underwater. All this may change with the arrival of Floating Liquid Natural Gas facilities, such as Shell’s 488 meter FLNG.
The FLiNG in context:
