Australian energy safety authorities order closure of ‘Prelude’ FLNG hull until considered safe to operate
The Australian energy safety authorities have ordered the closure of the “Prelude” floating liquefied natural gas production plant offshore northwest Australia after the latest incident in an electrical utility on board and reported on December 2.
The Shell-operated FLNG vessel is moored 400 kilometres north of the town of Broome on Western Australia’s Kimberley coast and has 3.6 million tonnes per annum of capacity.
The Australian National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) issued the order for a deeper safety probe by Shell.
This means Shell will likely be halting the offloading of LNG cargoes from “Prelude” into 2022 while the unreliable power shutdown issues are investigated .
The direction from NOPSEMA means the FLNG hull, the largest in the world, will be off stream until Shell can convince the regulators that the problem has been permanently fixed.
NOPSEMA has directed Shell to review what happened on the Prelude between December 2 and 6 and then develop a detailed plan to implement “all necessary corrective actions.”
Shell must also provide NOPSEMA with monthly reports on its progress from early March 2022.
Onboard inspectors
Shell must additionally convince the safety regulator that it can safely recover essential power and other services after a power outage alarm sounds.
“The failure to restore reliable power was seen to represent an ongoing impact and risk to the health and safety of the personnel on the facility,” said the NOPSEMA statement.
After visiting the 488m-long vessel NOPSEMA inspectors concluded that Shell “did not have a sufficient understanding of the risks of the power system on the facility, including failure mechanisms, inter-dependencies and recovery” mechanisms.
According to Shell, smoke triggered the automatic fire detection and management systems in the early December incident and an evacuation of most of the 200 or so crew on board was started. All workers on the facility were accounted for and no injuries reported.
The Shell facility was previously shut down for 11 months after electrical issues. Operations only resumed in February 2021 following an “electrical trip” in early 2020 and three incidents which NOPSEMA had described at the time as “dangerous occurrences”.
For the Shell project, the Concerto gas field and the nearby Prelude field, with combined resources of around 3 trillion cubic feet, are providing the feed gas to produce the LNG.
The Prelude joint venture is owned 67.5 percent by Shell and 17.5 percent by Inpex Corp. of Japan, operator of the Australian Ichthys project.
A further 10 percent of Prelude is held by LNG buyer Korea Gas Corp. and 5 percent by CPC Corp. of Taiwan.
