Saturday, December 19, 2015

The Biggest Thing Afloat

We've looked at the behemoth a couple times, links below.
From gCaptain:
The 600,000 tonnes Prelude FLNG facility, the largest offshore facility ever constructed, is nearing completion at the Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) shipyard in Geoje, South Korea.
Once completed, the floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility will be moored off Western Australia for a period of 20 to 25 years where it will be used to chill natural gas produced at the Prelude field to –162°C (-260°F), shrinking its volume by 600 times so it can be exported to customers in Asia....MORE
Previously:
January 10, 2014
Natural Gas: Shell Launches The Largest Vessel Ever Built (displacement larger than six aircraft carriers) RDS
And we're not talking little French aircraft carriers either.

From Lloyd's:

Lloyd's covers largest ever floating vessel
From the procurement of the steel to pumping the first gas, Lloyd’s is leading the insurance of Shell’s pioneering liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility, Prelude.

The hull of Prelude, Shell’s new LNG facility and the biggest vessel ever built, was carefully floated out of the dry dock at Samsung Heavy Industries’ shipyard in Geoje, South Korea, at the end of last month. The 488-metre-long hull is longer than the Empire State Building is tall and its LNG storage tanks have a capacity equivalent to 175 Olympic swimming pools.

When it is finished Prelude will weigh more than 600,000 tonnes fully loaded, displacing the same amount of water as six of the world’s largest aircraft carriers put together.

Yet while the Prelude facility is big, it is also small taking up one quarter the area of an equivalent onshore LNG plant. In what will be the first deployment of Shell’s floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) technology...MORE
Giving the French their due, they are planning on building  Porte-Avions 2 - "aircraft carrier 2", using the plans for the future Queen Elizabeth class ships that perfidious Albion is cooking up.
And again giving the French a tip of the old chapeau they did build these suckers:
Batillus tanker in Saint-Nazaire.jpg
Batillus class tanker, 555,000 DWT.
And from November 2014:
The Biggest Ship in the World (Though It Isn’t Exactly a Ship)
...
Prelude is not a ship or a boat: The Shell executives refer to their longer-than-the-Empire-State-Building-is-tall contraption as a facility. “Prelude F.L.N.G.,” they might say, is “the largest offshore floating facility ever built.” (F.L.N.G. stands for floating liquefied natural gas.) Then again, even the executives slip up once in a while and call it a ship, because the Prelude does in fact move, just a little, when it has to. In the finished sketches, it looks like a gigantic unfinished cruise ship, a 30-story Carnival Cruise Lines boat, built with an Erector set. ...MORE