Shell's Prelude is the world's largest floating facility for liquefied natural gas. It is 1,601 feet (488 meters) long and, fully loaded, displaces about 661,000 US tons (600,000 metric tonnes) of water.
How much room does a plant like that take?
It runs almost as long as five American football fields laid end to end.
The hull was launched in December 2013. The facility entered service in 2018, with a design life of 25 years.
But record size is only part of the story.
Prelude liquefies natural gas right at the offshore field. FLNG means floating liquefied natural gas facility. The processing happens on the water instead of in a plant on land.
That removes the need for shore infrastructure for this work: pipelines to land, gas compression platforms, loading ports, and processing plants.
More than 286,600 US tons (260,000 metric tonnes) of steel went into the structure. That scale puts the processing gear and the storage tanks in one place.
The gas does not travel to a shore plant.
The plant works at the field.
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