Marine Technology Reporter Blogs - korea

The hull of Shell's Prelude was floated in South Korea. When construction is complete, Prelude will be the largest floating facility ever created, weighing more than 600 thousand tons. It will be moored off Northwest Australia for natural gas production at Shell’s Prelude field beginning in 2017, and will operate for 25 years off Australia. The area where the Prelude FLNG will operate at the Browse Basin has a yearly cyclone season from November to April, but the Prelude has been designed to withstand such conditions. It is hoped the facility will be able to produce enough gas to power a medium sized city. The Prelude FLNG cannot strictly be described as a ship as it needs to be towed to its destination rather than travelling under its own power.

Maersk Line is building the world’s largest container ships to be known as the Triple-E class. Each ship will have a capacity of 18,000 20-foot containers (TEU) or most probably 9,000 40-foot containers, the later being more in use than the former. It’s important to note that TEU stands for twenty-foot equivalent units, therefore when dealing with 40-foot containers, we describe these as FEU (forty-foot equivalent). FEU may also be used to categorize two 20 foot containers. With the launching of this new class of container carrying ships Maersk will break its own world record. The Triple-E class ships are 400 meters long, 59 meters wide and 73 meters high, and the 20 new vessels on order are expected to be deployed on the vital Asia to Europe trade routes.