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.And from Motherboard:
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, Prelude will be towed to a remote basin around 475 kilometres north-east of Broome, Western Australia where it will operate for around 25 years. The facility will remain onsite during all weather having been designed to withstand a category 5 storm and is expected to produce around 3.6 million tonnes of LNG per annum to meet growing demand.
In safe hands
Lloyd’s is leading the insurance of the Prelude project, from the procurement of the steel and the fabrication through to the hook-up and pumping the first gas. Dominick Hoare, joint active underwriter with Lloyd’s Watkins syndicate said that although the technology is well established onshore, it is a new concept for the offshore energy sector. “The intriguing aspect from an insurance perspective was this application of existing technology on a new frontier,” he told lloyds.com. “But Shell is an industry expert in this field and working closely with its engineers reassured underwriters that the project is in safe hands.”
Existing technology that Shell has adapted for Prelude includes mooring systems to deal with the forces associated with securing the largest floating facility ever built, as well as LNG tanks that can handle ‘sloshing’ – the motions of the liquid LNG within the hull if and when there are stormy seas....MORE
Big Ass Tech
But Can It Weather Storms? And Other Questions About the World's New Largest Vessel
When you’ve got something unprecedented to insure, Lloyd’s of London is still the one to call, which is why the oil company Shell is having Lloyd’s insure the largest vessel on the seas or in the world—the floating natural gas field named the Prelude.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.
Floated out of Samsung Heavy Industry’s dry dock in Geoje, South Korea last month, the Prelude took to the water for the first time. At 1,602 feet, its hull is longer than the Empire State Building is tall and longer than the current “world’s biggest ship,” the Maersk Line, by nearly 290 feet, and 100 feet longer than the reigning all-time world’s biggest ship, the since-dismantled Knock Nevis.
Of course any comparison between Prelude and other so-called longest ships are going to be qualified, as the Prelude isn’t really a ship so much as an offshore gas field that just so happens to float.
Once it’s complete, the Prelude will be towed to the Browse Basin, about 300 miles northeast of Broome Australia, where Shell says it will be hooked up to undersea infrastructure of seven development wells that are around 830 feet below the surface. Then, for the next 20-25 years, in all weather including category-5 storms, the Prelude will stay there, sucking up natural gas, chilling it to 260 degrees below zero, then likely, sending it as a liquid to Asia to meet their growing natural gas demand, at a clip of 3.6 million tonnes of liquid natural gas a year....MORE
And again giving the French a tip of the old chapeau they did build these suckers:
Batillus class tanker, 555,000 DWT.
