Shell leads LNG competitors out to sea with biggest ship

For more than a decade, the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas producers led by Royal Dutch Shell plotted how to move their $170 billion industry onto barges at sea to tap remote fields. Now they’re finally doing it. The Houston Chronicle reports Shell will forge the hull of a floating LNG plant in South Korea by year-end that will be the world’s largest vessel, weighing six times as much as the biggest aircraft carrier, a Nimitz-class warship. Some 5,000 workers will build the factory to produce LNG off Australia’s northwest coast in a $13 billion project that also will shield Shell from escalating costs it would have to pay at the country’s onshore plants. Rivals, including both Malaysia’s Petroliam Nasional Bhd. and GDF Suez SA of France, likewise want to compress gas into liquid at sea, where many of the largest finds were made in the last decade. It’s a generational change for a land-based industry that started about 50 years ago in Algeria, where Shell provided technology for Camel, the first commercial LNG plant. Today those facilities typically cost at least $20 billion to build. Read the full story and see a rendering of Shell’s massive floating LNG plant here.