Taiwanese shipowner Nobu Su plans to offer a fleet of floating liquefaction units to the market by converting his company Today Makes Tomorrow’s very large ore oil carriers.
Nobu, who revealed in June that he had come up with a design for an LNG floater, said he wants to utilise his fleet of eight ‘Whale’ VLOOs. In a piece of “reverse engineering”, the shipowner said he would leave the 319,869-dwt, 2010 to 2011-built vessels’ existing tanks in situ and fit a Mark III-type LNG containment system inside to produce a triple-hulled FLNG unit.
He is currently working on the design with France’s membrane-type system designer GTT. Nobu said he is prepared to undertake the first hull conversion on TMT’s account.
He plans to put the first vessel into South Korean shipyard Hyundai Heavy Industries, which built the VLOOs, next year.
However, Nobu said TMT will seek customers to design and build the so-called Octopus8 units’ topsides since these will need to be designed to handle the characteristics of the specific gas fields under development.
The result would be a 340 by 60-metre unit with the capacity to produce around 1.5 million tonnes per annum of LNG, store 175,000 cbm of product and process condensate.
Nobu said front-end engineering and design for the floater is already being undertaken by a Singapore-based company.
He said he believes if a customer comes forward to add the topsides a unit can be ready by 2014.
In conjunction with Octopus8, Nobu said he has patented a design for a shuttle tanker called Squid able to offload cargoes from the floater.
