Posts under ‘Prelude FLNG Project’

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Sleep-deprived Prelude workers complain to offshore regulator

19 JULY 2021

OPERATIONAL managers of Shell’s Prelude facility are being accused of blatantly ignoring serious work safety occupational health and safety breaches as workers complain they’re being forced to work on only two to three hours’ sleep.

Shell’s FLNG facility moored offshore Western Australian has become notorious for the poor conditions faced by workers onboard.

Members of the union group The Offshore Alliance have made an official complaint to the offshore regulator, NOPSEMA, urging it to investigate alleged breaches of fatigue management standards. read more

Shell’s $12 Billion Prelude LNG Barge Drifts Toward A Finale

Prelude’s future darkens as losses mount.

Tim Treadgold: Contributor: Asia: April 26, 2021

Prelude or finale, that’s a question some observers are starting to ask about a $12 billion ship called Prelude which was supposed to revolutionize the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry.

Built by Royal Dutch Shell, Prelude is designed to move from one offshore gasfield to another, avoiding the need for costly offshore structures and pipelines to shore-based gas processing facilities. read more

Shell predicts free gas forever from Gorgon and Prelude LNG projects

by Peter Milne | Mar 31, 2021 | Energy & Environment

Shell’s accountants predict the Dutch giant will never pay Australia for gas extracted at the Gorgon and Prelude LNG projects that it can sell for up to about $4 billion a year. Peter Milne from independent energy and climate news site Boiling Cold has the story.

Dutch giant Shell forecasts it will never pay Australia for oil and gas extracted for the Gorgon and Prelude LNG projects that it can sell for up to almost $4 billion a year. read more

Prelude: A year of working dangerously

Mark Tilly: Journalist: 05 February 2021

“…unions allege a culture of silence that keeps many other incidents unreported thanks to employees’ fear of reprisals.: One complainant filed in April, 2020 said they had been “intimidated and pressured by numerous phone calls and messages from representatives of the Shell company…”

SHELL’s floating LNG facility made headlines last year for all the wrong reasons, after a spate of technical issues forced the multi-billion dollar facility to halt production and cease sending cargoes for almost a year just months after it finally started up. read more

LNG production at Shell’s Prelude gas processing plant in Western Australia restarts following 11-month closure

“As for making money from this project, that’s extremely unlikely because the cost overruns and completion delays are in the horrendous category,”…

Key points:

• The facility was shutdown for 11 months after electrical and safety problems
• Some analysts hold concerns about the facility’s economic and environmental performance
• Shell has never revealed the cost of constructing Prelude

Liquified natural gas (LNG) production has restarted this month on the world’s largest floating object, Shell’s half-kilometre long Prelude gas processing facility.

The restart is much-needed good news after an 11-month shutdown following a technical issue only described as an “electrical trip” by Shell, and three incidents that the offshore energy regulator NOPSEMA described as “dangerous occurrences”. read more

MYSTERY OVER SUDDEN DIVERSION OF LNG TANKERS BOUND FOR SHELL’S TROUBLED PRELUDE FLNG 

Extracts from Reuters article – Two LNG tankers bound for Australia’s Prelude facility divert..

It is not clear why the ships changed their destinations from Prelude…: Shell declined to comment on the matter.

EXTRACTS FROM RELATED SPECULATION BY RETIRED SENIOR SHELL EXPERTS

Your the wiz kid on tanker movements

….seems to me the only logical reason for such diversion of for example the Gaslog Glasgow was there was not a sufficiency of LNG to load on or around the 15 January (the first load was offtaken on 8 January) when to meet the 3.6m tonnes design output it would have been required to load around this time and I think you calculated that to meet the 3.6 mt/a  given an average LNG carrier capacity an offload would be expected every circa 7 –  10 days,… read more

UPDATE 1-Two LNG tankers bound for Australia’s Prelude facility divert-shiptracking data

By Reuters Staff: JANUARY 19, 2021

(Adds comment from Shell)

SINGAPORE, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Two liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers that had initially signalled they would load at Royal Dutch Shell’s Prelude floating LNG facility in Australia have diverted elsewhere, shiptracking data showed on Tuesday.

This comes just a week after Shell said that Prelude would resume loading cargoes after production had been suspended for nearly a year following an electrical trip. read more

Two LNG Tankers Bound for Australia’s Prelude Facility Divert

Jessica Jaganathan January 19, 2021

Two liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers that had initially signaled they would load at Royal Dutch Shell’s Prelude floating LNG facility in Australia have diverted elsewhere, ship-tracking data showed on Tuesday.

This comes just a week after Shell said that Prelude would resume loading cargoes after production had been suspended for nearly a year following an electrical trip.

The facility loaded its first cargo since coming back online on Jan. 8 onto the LNG tanker Symphonic Breeze which delivered its shipment into Japan on Monday. read more

Australia’s Prelude FLNG shipments resume: Shell

Published date: 11 January 2021

Cargo shipments have resumed at the 3.6mn t/yr Prelude floating LNG (FLNG) offshore Western Australia (WA), around 11 months after it went off line in February 2020 because of technical issues.

“LNG cargoes have resumed from Shell’s Prelude FLNG facility,” said operator Shell.

Prelude FLNG in the Browse basin has been plagued by technical issues since it started shipments in June 2019. read more

Prelude was planned as a flagship floating LNG project for the Anglo-Dutch supermajor. Like most other large-scale offshore LNG projects, however, it ran into delays and cost overruns.

Shell Restarts Production At Huge Prelude Project As LNG Prices Soar

By Irina Slav – Jan 11, 2021, 11:00 AM CST

Shell has restarted production of liquefied natural gas at its Prelude offshore project in Australia after almost a year’s suspension.

“LNG cargoes have resumed from Shell’s Prelude FLNG facility,” Argus reported, citing a company statement. read more

“Prelude has been a ‘white elephant’…

Shell resumes gas shipments from world’s largest floating structure

Jamie Smyth in Sydney: 11 Jan 2021

The restart of the huge Prelude facility — which at 488 metres is longer than four football fields — is a welcome boost for Shell as it coincides with a record surge in LNG prices fuelled by a cold snap in Asia. But construction challenges, cost overruns and technical problems with Prelude, as well as challenging market conditions, have prompted Shell and other producers to cancel other FLNG projects. “Prelude has been a ‘white elephant’ — we always felt it was a technology looking for a solution rather than the other way round,” said Neil Beveridge, an analyst at Bernstein. read more

2020 Was One of the Worst-Ever Years for Oil Write-Downs

Royal Dutch Shell’s Prelude floating facility has struggled to deliver income. PHOTO: ROYAL DUTCH SHELL AUSTRALIA/REUTERS

By Collin Eaton and Sarah McFarlane: Dec. 27, 2020 9:00 am ET

The pandemic has triggered the largest revision to the value of the oil industry’s assets in at least a decade, as companies sour on costly projects amid the prospect of low prices for years.

Oil-and-gas companies in North America and Europe wrote down roughly $145 billion combined in the first three quarters of 2020, the most for that nine-month period since at least 2010, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That total significantly surpassed write-downs taken over the same periods in 2015 and 2016, during the last oil bust, and is equivalent to roughly 10% of the companies’ collective market value. read more

Shell to write down assets again, taking cuts to more than $22 billion

In October, Shell, the world’s biggest LNG trader, wrote down the value of its LNG portfolio by just under $1 billion, focusing on its flagship Prelude project in Australia.

By Ron Bousso: 21 December 2020

LONDON (Reuters) – Royal Dutch Shell on Monday said it will write down the value of oil and gas assets by $3.5 billion to $4.5 billion following a string of impairments this year as it adjusts to a weaker outlook. read more

Javier Ferrandis: Follow: Researcher: Published December 8, 2020

Extracts from an extensive article by former Shell Petroleum Economist Javier Ferrandis:

The CARLYLE-MUBADALA ALLIANCE: A NEW BLUEPRINT FOR OIL AND GAS BRIBERY

Information about the nine-year period Javier Ferrandis spent at Shell can be found at the foot of this article.

I would argue in this article that the overvalued and questionable purchase of Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala owned CEPSA by the Carlyle group in 2019 was part of a USA government-sponsored bribery operation connected to the transfer of large Oil & Gas concessions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into the hands of Chinese National Oil Companies and other oil companies based in countries that collaborated with the 1MDB operation and that happen to be main recipients of UAE crude oil exports. The timing of the 1MDB operation and specifically the purchase of Coastal Energy by Abu-Dhabi owned CEPSA and the 1MDB Chinese middleman Jho Low was chosen to coincide exactly with the historic expiration of the 75 years old Abu-Dhabi oil concessions. read more

Shell Australia and unions to commence formal EBA bargaining

In August, Shell Australia urged its workforce to move to a new fly-in, fly-out, roster which would see FIFO staff work four weeks at a time. The AWU and MUA described it as a “suicide roster” and raised concerns that workers would not see enough of their families. Shell offered a one-off payment of $50,000 to workers who took up the new roster. Prior to this, unions raised concerns that Shell was outsourcing work to India instead of offering Australian workers employment.     read more

Australia’s LNG exports at nine-month high

Published date: 03 December 2020

…the Shell-operated…Prelude floating LNG venture remaining off line. The plant offshore Western Australia is unlikely to restart before next year, and has been off line since February.

Australia’s LNG exports rose to a nine-month high of 7.04mn t in October, driven by record shipments from the Queensland port of Gladstone.

Total LNG shipments increased from 6.22mn t in September when the LNG plants at Gladstone were undertaking significant maintenance. The increase to 7.04mn t, which is just below the record monthly high of 7.22mn t set in January, comes despite the Shell-operated 3.6mn t/yr Prelude floating LNG venture remaining off line. The plant offshore Western Australia is unlikely to restart before next year, and has been off line since February. read more