Prelude – Largest Floating LNG Facility

March 20, 2017

Prelude is the largest floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing facility in the world. This half-kilometer long vessel will be moored off the Australian coast over remote undersea natural gas wells converting methane into LNG which will then be offloaded onto tankers. The ship is so big that the 120,000 tons of ballast it requires for stability weighs more than an aircraft carrier.  Prelude is a new generation facility that compresses the sprawling mass of a traditional land-based LNG plant into the comparatively tight footprint of a giant custom-built barge. It will be leaving port later this year, and production is slated to being in 2018.

Just like any land-based industrial facility, Prelude has an incredible number of instrument systems whose alarms, production targets, operator actions and instrument readings need to be monitored and managed to insure efficient and safe operation. UTL, the operations monitoring and reporting solution from AIS Software has been installed on Prelude to manage their process information.

The following website from Shell provides a lot of information about this floating platform and gives you an idea of the sheer size of this incredible vessel.