Shell's Prelude floating LNG production project offshore Australia is on track for operations around 2017, but the project is under no schedule pressure to be the first operating FLNG facility to hit the water, Shell said Wednesday at a technology briefing in The Hague, the Netherlands.
The company said it wanted to focus on executing the project so that the technology could be transferred to future smaller FLNG facilities.
"Because the success of this is reliable operations, we are really coming at having this right, rather than being the first," Marjan van Loon, Shell vice president for LNG and processing, said.
Due to the scale of the project, Shell said it will take a few years to construct and acknowledged Prelude FLNG may not necessarily be the first to start operations.
"We can't comment on what others are doing. We know there's a lot of people looking at floating developments," van Loon added.
Since Shell made its final investment decision in May 2011, the project has been progressing well. The steel for the well pads was cut last year, and in May this year the steel for the turrets will be cut.
Shell has already started recruiting personnel to operate the facility.
Prelude will liquefy the gas offshore. The Prelude development involves positioning a floating LNG production and storage unit on the Prelude field in the Browse Basin 200 km (124 miles) offshore.
The vessel would measure as large as the equivalent of six US aircraft carriers.
It is designed for fields of around 2-3 Tcf of reserves, with processing of 650-750,000 Mcf/day (18-21 million cubic meters/day). It could store 220,000 cubic meters of LNG, 90,000 cu m of LPG and 126,000 cu m of condensate.
The vessel would spend around 20-25 years on the field, but could then be moved elsewhere.
