HULL OF FLNG UNIT READY FOR LAUNCH

The Italian energy company ENI, in coordination with Mozambique’s National Hydrocarbon Company (ENH), plans to launch on Tuesday the Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) unit that has been under construction, at the naval shipyard of Samsung Heavy Industries, in the South Korean city of Busan, since March 2018.

Cited by Radio Mozambique, project manager Luca Faccenda said the hull of the unit “is particularly important since it will contain the LNG. This is the ship that will produce the liquefied gas, and that liquefied gas will remain stored on board the ship”    .   The hull is 43 metres long and 66 metres wide. Its storage capacity is 234,000 cubic metres. The annual production from this unit should be 3.4 million tonnes of LNG.    “We are ready to launch the hull into the water, which is a very specific activity for a ship with these characteristics”, said Faccenda. It will take many hours, starting on Monday night (Korean time), and ending at about 08.00 on Tuesday.   When the vessel is complete and fully tested, it will be towed to the Mozambique Channel, where it will float above the Coral South gas field, in Area Four of the Rovuma Basin, off the coast of the northern province of Cabo Delgado.The unit should be taken to Mozambique by late November 2021, and the LNG production is expected to begin in 2022. This will be the first of the various Rovuma Basin LNG projects to start production.  The main participant in Area Four is Mozambique Rovuma Ventures, a partnership between ENI, the US oil and gas giant ExxonMobil and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which together control 70 per cent of the undertaking. The remaining 30 per cent are divided equally between ENH, Galp Energia of Portugal, and Kogas of South Korea.