Lloyd’s Register published a comprehensive rule set to guide the design, construction and operation of FLNG facilities to provide safer, cheaper and more environmentally friendly approaches to retrieving natural gas.
“Natural gas is a key part of the energy mix and its safe and economic production is becoming increasingly more important,” said Mark Tipping, principal engineer for FLNG development in Lloyd’s Register. “FLNG facilities are being designed to extract gas reserves which have been discovered in some of the world’s deepest waters, answering society’s demand for the provision of more carbon-lite energy sources. The FLNG facilities we have worked on to form these rules will be the biggest floating structures ever seen and in the future, they will allow operators to unlock the world’s stranded offshore natural gas reserves in areas like North Western Australia’s Browse Basin.”
With natural gas prices set to vary greatly between countries in the near future, FLNG is needed to supplement pipelines in the transportation of this low-carbon fuel. Equally, the energy industry requires more effective storage solutions as demand fluctuates. Flexibility is also a rising concern. Industry experts point to FLNG as a solution that can offer easy transportation, storage and flexible supply of natural gas in an increasingly uncertain energy landscape.
Lloyd’s Register’s 50-year offshore experience, including its technical knowledge of LNG containment and liquefaction technology, FPSO development and process engineering systems, has made it possible for this certification and classification society to publish the first set of rules to comprehensively look at all areas of FLNG facilities.
“We continually update our offshore rules in collaboration with our panel of industry partners to ensure that they are relevant to the technological advancement being made on the FLNG arena. The FLNG rules are being developed in three stages which will allow us to consult with industry experts both internally and externally. We will release the first phase of the offshore rules which were developed in conjunction with our offshore technical committee in April.”
According to the International Energy Authority, the world’s primary energy demand will increase by 37% between to 2035 with the natural gas share overtaking coal before 2035 and starting to reach parity with oil soon after 2040. Gas reserves currently remain abundant yet they are technologically complex to both extract and transport. Liquefied natural gas takes up about 1/600th the volume of natural gas yet until now, formal FLNG design codes have remained underdeveloped and this has presented challenges to develop production engineering systems.
The Offshore Rules are freely available to download from www.lr.org/offshorerules.