History
Oil has been produced from offshore locations since the late 1940s. Originally, all oil platforms sat on the seabed, but as exploration moved to deeper waters and more distant locations in the 1970s, floating production systems came to be used.
The first oil FPSO was the Shell Castellon, built in Spain in 1977. Today, over 200 vessels are deployed worldwide as oil FPSOs.
In addition to the significant growth of this market sector, we are witnessing today the progressive extension of the significant knowledge base of building and operating these floating facilities to provide solutions for other segments of the oil and gas industry.
As an example, the Sanha LPG FPSO, which operates offshore Angola, is the first such vessel with complete onboard liquefied petroleum gas processing and export facilities. It can store up to 135,000 cubic meters of LPG while awaiting export tankers for offloading.
Another very promising expansion is the progressive development of the floating LNG (FLNG) market. An LNG FPSO works under the same principles an oil FPSO works under, taking the well stream and separating out the natural gas (primarily methane and ethane) and producing LNG, which is stored and offloaded.
On July 29, 2009, Shell and Samsung announced an agreement to build up to 10 LNG FPSOs:
Flex LNG has four contracts for smaller units at the same yard.
As a very significant and momentous event, on May 20, 2011, Royal Dutch Shell announced the planned development of a Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) facility, which will be situated 200 km off the coast of Western Australia and is due for completion in around 2017. When it is finished, this will be the largest floating offshore facility. It will measure around 488m long and 74m wide, and when fully ballasted will weigh 600,000 tonnes. It will have a total storage capacity of 436,000 cubic metres of LNG, plus LPG condensate.
At the opposite (discharge and regasification) end of the LNG chain, the first ever conversion of an LNG carrier (Golar LNG owned Moss type LNG carrier) into an LNG floating storage and regasification unit was carried out in 2007 by Keppel shipyard in Singapore.
Read more about this topic: Floating Production Storage And Offloading
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