zoomImage Courtesy: Lloyd's Register

Shell’s floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facility Prelude has officially entered into Lloyd’s Register (LR) class.

Featuring a length of 488 meters and a width of 74 meters and displacing about 600,000 tons of water, Prelude is the largest floating offshore facility in the world.

Last month, Prelude arrived at its operating location in the Browse Basin, offshore northwest Australia. It will be moored at a depth of 250 meters and will not be dry-docked for the first 25 years of its expected 50-year operational life.

As explained, the facility required around 260,000 tons of steel to build and its turret is the largest ever built. It has been designed to withstand category five cyclones and its technology has generated over 150 patents.

LR said it has been involved in the project from the start, helping to ensure the unit will operate safely by applying FLNG expertise through classification, equipment certification, validation and verification against performance standards.

Prelude’s substructure and turret have been designed and constructed in accordance with LR’s Rules for Floating Offshore Installations at a Fixed Location and its topsides certified to an agreed set of industry codes and standards. LR also confirmed compliance of the facility with Shell’s design and engineering practices, where applicable, and the performance standards specified by Prelude’s safety case.

The intended risk based classification scheme is expected to benefit from the use of the latest in remote inspection technologies to gather accurate and repeatable survey data to allow a predictive and focused approach, according to LR. The LR team in Perth will be welcoming colleagues from LR’s Geoje office in the coming months to assist in the transition from the yard through offshore commissioning to the operations phase.

“By using the latest in ROV and AUV deployed equipment, we see big opportunities for improvement in the safety, accuracy and manner of offshore facility inspection in service and we anticipate that this will flow on to a new way of approaching classification,” Jeff Baker, LR’s Offshore Business Development Manager for Australasia, commented.