Shipyards and engineering contractors are linking up to bid on Petronas’ third floating LNG unit, for which tender documents were recently issued.
Those following the effort said TechnipFMC, Saipem JGC and KBR are among the pre-qualified engineering companies in talks with South Korea’s big-three shipbuilders — Hyundai Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and Samsung Heavy Industries — and China's Hudong-Zhonghua Shipbuilding (Group).
They said two to three yard-engineer pairings are expected to be selected by Petronas to undertake 10-month-long front-end engineering and design (FEED) work, which would kick-off at the end of this year.
Timings
Bids are due in for the work by mid-August, with Petronas set to name its preferred parties by September. But those tendering are understood to have requested extensions to the schedule.
Petronas sent out a formal tender at the end of June for what will be its third FLNG unit.
The company wants to install a two-million-tonne-per-annum, barge-based structure fitted with membrane-type tanks, and the unit will be moored to a jetty.
It is to be located in Sipitang Oil & Gas Industrial Park in Sabah, East Malaysia, and will use an existing jetty, which will be extended under the work.
This connects to Petronas Chemicals Fertiliser's Sabah facility. There are also plans for tie-ins for a virtual pipeline system, LNG bunkering and onshore and subsea feed gas pipelines.
Petronas has asked that yards building the hulls work exclusively with their engineering partners handling the units' topsides.
First mover
The Malaysian state energy company has already put two FLNG units into operation.
Petronas pulled off a world first in April 2017 by exporting a first cargo from its 1.2-mtpa LNG floater PFLNG Satu (built 2016), which was built by DSME and Technip.
The unit was initially deployed off Sarawak state, to the south-west of Sabah, on the main gas field linked to Petronas’ Bintulu LNG plant, but was shifted to monetise another gasfield in 2019.
In March 2021, Petronas smashed another FLNG record by becoming the first company to produce LNG from two floaters.
The company exported a first cargo from the SHI-Technip-built, 1.6-mtpa PFLNG Dua (built 2020), which is monetising the Rotan gasfield, 140 km off Kota Kinabalu in east Malaysia.
There are currently only two other FLNG units in operation — Golar LNG’s 2.4-mtpa Hilli Episeyo off Cameroon and Shell’s 3.6-mtpa Prelude FLNG unit off north-west Australia.
The 500,000-tonnes-per-annum, barge-based Tango FLNG, which is controlled by Exmar, is currently sitting idle.
