The largest vessel the world has ever seen | Hacker News Reader

The largest vessel the world has ever seen

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Pretty sure this is the Prelude: https://www.google.com/maps/place/%EA%B1%B0%EC%A0%9C%EC%8B%9...

And a little bit north you can see that big crane on a barge in the water. Very cool.

I'm measuring 496m long, so not that many possibilities.

Yeah, I measured it as well, but couldn't say for certain, so 'pretty sure' seemed like a safe modifier.

Great spot!

The giant pivot-hole in the bow seems to confirm, as well as the size...

And the first word of the second paragraph being "Prelude" was a pretty good clue, too.

The 'this' the OP was referring to was the vessel in the Google Maps link they posted.

Side note: the inversion of the map was really interesting, I spent about 10min look at all the countries South to North trying to see if I could identify them.

That really is an incredible achievement. It's 1/3 of a mile long. Travelling at the speed of sound you'd take 1.4 seconds to go from the bow to the stern. You'd only need 82,000 of these ships to encircle the Earth at the equator. It's 203 times bigger than the largest natural sea creature (a Blue Whale), and more than 3000 times heavier.

Bit of a shame it's dedicated to continuing our use of fossil fuels really.

Supply and demand, unfortunately. On the bright side, I think even our use of fossil fuels has gotten cleaner and more efficient, and as solar/wind power becomes more efficient, market forces will give them a greater piece of the pie.

Have people who parrot "supply and demand" ever heard of marketing, advertising or sales?

"Bit of a shame it's dedicated to continuing our use of fossil fuels really."

Well, I guess the onus is on us to greatly reduce our use of fossil fuels. They're doing their part to more efficiently meet our demand. We can't help but be happy when gas gets cheap then we can buy large vehicles again.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/12/02/automake...

True, but I'd rather another LNG field than another coal mine or crude refinery. As fossil fuels go, natural gas is the least bad option.

Unfortunately, companies don't create more LNG fields and fewer refineries because people on the internet understand that it's a cleaner solution. It's about supply and demand. Our choice in the cars we drive has more of a vote.

If we've gotta use the fuels, I'd prefer we use the latest/best tech to get it.

The curvature of the earth is measurable between the bow and stern of this ship. If the ship were perfectly flat and you leveled out the front, I'd estimate the back to be at a 1.8cm higher altitude.

> Bit of a shame it's dedicated to continuing our use of fossil fuels really.

Relative to baseline this probably consumes the least fossil fuels per tonne of any FF-powered transportation mechanism, so relative to baseline this vessel pushes our fuel usage closer to sustainability.

>probably consumes the least fossil fuels per tonne

I don't believe that the commenter to whom you're replying is referring to the use of fossil fuels to transport the ship (which I believe has to be towed.) They seem to be referring to the fact that it is for processing fossil fuels. It's about production, not consumption.

Ah, sorry missed that aspect. Thanks!

I'd rather this ship with the latest technology is transporting fuels from small drilling rigs than rainforest in Southeast Asia and South America being clear felled to make bio fuels.

Fuel use is morally defensible and fossil fuels are the most efficient fuel for the time being. Until a replacement tech is found and developed then the correct thing to do is find more efficient extraction, transportation and use of fossil fuel. Happily that's the way things are going as the current price drop demonstrates.

And that price drop will increase consumption.

It's unfortunate, but developments in fuel efficiency will inevitably lead to higher use. This is a general principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

From this it could be argued that the "morally correct" thing to do would be to discourage research into more efficient ways of extracting bad fuels, and use those freed resources to study alternative sources of energy. You don't want to keep widening the profitability gap.

"Bad fuel"? All fuels have costs and benefits. Natural gas is probably the best one going. Extraction has minimal environmental impact, it burns clean with very little pollution and can't be spilled into the ocean like oil. It's also versatile, being suitable as a vehicle fuel, a heating / cooking fuel and as a basis for both large scale industrial and electrical production. I'd say that before an alternative large scale energy source is developed, natural gas is the best way forward.

All of that may be true, but it doesn't mitigate the fundamental problem: it's a CO2-releasing fossil fuel. Alternative energy sources don't just magically drop out of the sky through the inexorable march of utopian technology - they get developed through effort. The more expensive and inconvenient a fuel is, the higher the incentive to work on alternatives. Again, why widen the gap by improving extraction efficiency? In the short term, it will increase use by lowering the price, and in the long term it will slow the development of clean fuels. Neither of these is good for the environment.

Incidentally, we already have an alternative large-scale energy source - nuclear. It has problems (mainly red tape and waste-disposal), but the worst-case scenario for nuclear doesn't involve the mass-destruction of ecosystems and coastal towns across the globe.

Is it the largest? Longest, yes, but http://www.oedigital.com/energy/item/571-the-new-leviathan claims

"Excluding any protruding lift equipment, the new vessel will be 382m long [...]. Shell's Prelude FLNG facility [...] will be 488m long. But it is the plan view of these vessels that is the more telling in terms of displacement. Pieter Schelte will be 117m wide, against Prelude's 74m"

That is 50% wider and 25% shorter. Height, I couldn't find. Prelude is bulkier, though (the Pieter Schelte is a catamaran)

Just as amazing as the ship, I'm in awe at the mazes of pipes, scaffolding, cranes, etc. Just think that teams of people had to design and lay all those structures out, and teams of more people had to cut and weld all those together.

Also the scheduling of it all; when building ships, there are things which must be done be for others such as welding in parts A,D,L before piece C is installed because if piece C is installed first, parts A,D,L can't be installed due to new physical access restrictions. It's a coordination master-work all by itself.

You would think so, but having worked on a ship built at SHI there is still a lot of installing part c, cutting it out, installing A, D, and L and then reinstalling C.

And to think they did this all without version control.

It's Object Oriented - they build the modules separately and plugged them into to the Framework (ship).

I think having a huge plant on a ship means they can staff it with workers from 3rd world countries without worrying about Australian visas, employment laws, etc. It's not uncommon for local miners to earn north of $200k per year.

I was on cruise around Queensland last year - ship never left Australian waters, yet all crew was from Asia and they had a casino on board. Prettty sure it'd be illegal to open a gambling venue like that on the soil

Sounds like good news for the people from 3rd world countries.

Nothing wrong with exploiting people as long as you can argue they're better off this way, eh comrade?

So I guess in your world all employees are exploited? They are doing a job, they are getting paid. What is the problem?

>I think having a huge plant on a ship means they can staff it with workers from 3rd world countries

FPSOs in Australian waters are crewed with 100% Australian crews. Unfortunately this means FPSO operators need to deal with the likes of the Maritime Union of Australia, that makes the Teamsters look reasonable.

I didn't know that. Is that a law, or just the way it's currently done?

Prelude will be the world's first operational FLNG. It is somewhat longer and wider than Knock Nevis, but the fully-loaded displacement will be less. And Knock Nevis was a ship; Prelude is a floating platform that must be towed.

Pieter Schelte is a ship (under construction). It's shorter than Prelude and Nevis but, due to twin hulls, much wider and heavier when loaded (displacement is 900,000 metric tons).

The first and probably not the last. It reminds me of fish factory ships [1], where fish are processed at sea rather than being brought back to shore for processing. What's next? Maybe assembling airplane parts while in transit?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_ship

It would be interesting to know whether the ordinary rules of nautical operation change at a scale like this. For instance, ordinary waves would have no effect at all on something this size (aside from rocking the structure, of course). You could probably be in 10-20' swells and it wouldn't any kind of danger. Rogue waves? A 100' wave would be like normal choppy seas for a small boat.

The scale is incredible. It's less of a boat and morelike a small metal island that's self-propelled.

I've been in 80 foot swells on a Nimitz class carrier - tossed it around like nothing. Dented the bow all in - and did some other damage. I realize this is quite a bit bigger but I think you underestimate what the ocean could do to it.

Really? Who was the silly bugger that sailed the ship into such weather? I hope the nukes were securely stowed...

We got caught in a rather bad storm working our way from South Korea back to Alameda. We were in a rush to get back as their had just been a bad earthquake in the bay area and a lot of people had family there.

As to the second, I cannot confirm or deny.....

>You could probably be in 10-20' swells and it wouldn't any kind of danger.

You are quite right!

The design conditions for Austrlian North-West Shelf include waves with ~14 meters significant height occuring with a frequency of once in 100 years, and ~20 meters once in 10,000 years. The permanently installed (some are disconnectable) facilities are typically designed to keep operating in 100-year return conditions and to survive 10,000 year return conditions.

By the way the ratio of maximum trough-to-peak wave height to "significant" height is about 1.8:1. So the wave you'd see in a 10,000 year storm would look to be 36 m (120 ft) tall...!

I know my thinking is probably damaged by the war on terror, but my first thought was "engineering is doable, but how will you secure the thing". It is a nice juicy target. And as the recent events have shown - even small tinkering with supply and demand of fossil fuels can have global consequences.

We have refineries on land, too. We just put fences around them. The ocean is a big fence.

On land we have them secured - solid rock from the bottom, national air defense from the air, and big security teams + police and even military forces ready to react at minimal notice.

Hijacking a plane that is traveling between second and third world countries is plausible - MH370 showed that there are deficiencies in aircraft tracking. And while submarine attack is not trivial it is not totally impossible.

And if we have a couple of years down the road a situation like the current - with free falling oil prices, there are state actors for which some disruption will be welcome.

I'd expect this to be easier to secure than the LNG plant that it replaces. No pipelines to secure, just ocean around, so it's very hard to sneak up on it. Access can be controlled much better since there's no fence somebody might throw equipment over. A small dinghy is not going to put a major dent in that beast, even if loaded with explosives. The sides are impossible to scale. It's a floating fortress.

Will it have sonar? Approaching from below would be trivial.

Cynical: only state actors have access to attack submarines. Realistic: if you have reliable underwater access you may just want to siphon the gas.

Didn't Russia recently have subs in Swedish waters covertly?

In the petro field, I would be most concerned about state actors at the moment who have a huge incentive to decrease supply to increase the price on the world market.

It's certainly not trivial to approach from below. The facility will be located 100 miles off the coast - it's not like you'll just jump in the harbor and swim that distance. So you'd need a ship to bring you close and then bring explosives with you. So you need them waterproofed and large enough to actually damage that beast. Puncturing a few holes in the hull will not significantly damage this. If you're trying to attack a LNG plant on land you can at least try and drive a large van through the gate.

Addressing you and some other grandchild comments:

This is why we have a navy, not to mention the supporting apparatus of land-, sea-, and space-based monitoring of the air and seas.

Unless this thing is placed under a heavily-trafficked air route, attacks from non-state groups are unlikely to succeed, as the divergent flight-path of a commercial airliner will set off alarms.

And state actors would be declaring war by attacking this thing.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing

Divers attaching charges to the hull would be another low-tech way to take a vessel like this down. Low tech mines would probably do a pretty good job too.

That was at port, though. This ship is planned to spend 25 years at sea. Certainly a ship carrying divers would have to get close enough so as to be obvious.

This thing will be permantently moored in a part of the planet reknowned for the ferocity of the cyclones it gets each season.

Mother Nature will be attacking it too, and the designers know it. So it would probably have to be big mine.

And state actors would be declaring war by attacking this thing.

France didn't declare war on New Zealand with the Rainbow Warrior bombing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

Don't worry, most 'terrorism' is about control of oil fields/pipelines. No terrorist will be stupid enough to blow up this.

Just make sure the front doesn't fall off. /s

Seriously though, I can't imagine that maintenance will be very easy on this rig, and you really want your CNG plant to be well maintained and inspected

Well, that's not supposed to happen.

The Browse Basin project was originally going to be onshore - until the traditional land owners wouldn't release the land for somewhere in the tune for $3B AUD. Coupled with the budget blowout for the Gorgon Project building large LNG facilities in Australia will likely not happen again anytime soon.

The Prelude has had a lot of Australian engineering input but based on my experience working on the maintenance side with other FPSOs (especially those of Korean and Singaporan manufacture) there will be a lot of headaches with the Prelude.

Integrity control is at the top of the list for the Prelude design, but this may go the way of the Gorgon Project in terms of budget once they get it to the field. Last I heard there are still some issues with the field development side of things so even if they finish the vessel in time, it may be a while before production is able to go.

The way I understood it, the traditional land owners were all too happy to get the jobs and royalties associated, but were overruled by out-of-town activists. Is that true or false?

I've heard a number of different stories on the matter, none that I'd want to perpetuate too much.

It was more economical to build the world's largest vessel and develop a lot of new technology than to deal with the issues involved with an onshore facility - interpret that however you'd like.

Well, in my book, it's a devastating loss for economic development of people in dire poverty and the associated social issues that come with that. Regardless of how it came about.

Compared to the Titanic, it's almost twice as big! (Titanic: 269m vs Prelude: 496m)

For a good related time, please google for the skyscraper index by Andrew Lawrence. The TLDR is in a boring commodity market like skyscrapers (... or boats?) you always get the "worlds biggest" right before a financial collapse.

Anecdotally Parkinson's theory about fancy buildings mean a company is dying hold true across my decades of telecom experience. So if you look at this as the fanciest boat ever made not just the largest, Parkinson's theory applies and that corporation is doomed.

It is sort of selection bias. Large buildings (and boats) are more effective, so it makes sense to build them if you have enough money.

And comparing gas rig platform with 'fancy' luxurious boat just does not make sense.

If you think of it in terms of that they "need to" make such a construct to do business, as opposed to being able to do business without such a big investment, then it makes a bit of sense.

Which corporation—Samsung, who built it, or Shell, who bought it?

Shell

Can we really apply that kinda theory to this operation though? This ship is presumably the largest because they need to fit an entire factory on it, not because they are trying to one-up their competitors in some kind of gambit.

Indeed. This will be the first floating LNG (FLNG) processing facility, not just another Big Fucking Mega Boat(TM).

And there will be more of the FLNG facilities, too.

Studying and mitigating the effects of wave motion and wind interference is also a particularly impressive feat in industrial engineering.

Since the facilities will be rated to withstand weather conditions comparable (or better) to standing ones, one could even say that they're more reliable with increased uptime.

It's not like we are running out of luxury buildings or luxury yachts, so their prices are very unlikely to go up - but then can collapse. While in the meantime, as we have less and less of natural gas, its price will increase. Of course, it might collapse as well, if the demands stops. But I think it's a lot more likely that we would stop buying luxury yachts than we would stop burning fossil fuels.

Good news—Comcast is building a new skyscraper in philadelphia.

That's kind of like saying that you always find what you're looking for at the last place you look.

I don't think this logic applies to steamships. Larger vessels travel faster and provide an economies-of-scale effect that drastically reduces operating cost per unit of freight. The initial investment is large but in the long run it makes shipping a lot cheaper.

Of course you will get the "worlds biggest" before any sort of collapse. Its like the same adage when trying to look for something 'it is always the last place you look'.

"I was going to build the world's longest suspension bridge, but then I found out someone had already done it." - Jack Handey

Not sure why the downvotes. You are making a valid point. If shell is making such big, complicated investment it means that all the low hanging fruits are gone.

They need to do it because there is no easy gas left to tap (for them). A lot of the good and easy stuff is under government control.

So it is a gamble. If they fail - it could drag down the whole corporation. If they succeed they will get quite rich.

I wonder at what price gas needs to be for this to be profitable?

They aren't making more fossil fuels. Wait long enough, just about anything to extract them efficiently becomes profitable.

"They aren't making more fossil fuels." -- Well, they are, just rather slowly. All the fossil fuels we use now have been created since the Cambrian and most have been created since the start of the Mesozoic. And if we are willing to wait another 300 million years, we can have yet another 2 centuries of vigorous economic growth based on fossil fuel consumption. In fact, we can probably have 200 good years, every 300 million years, for as long as the Earth lasts.

2 centuries? I think you may not be including the availability of coal, from which oil can be produced.

Thomas Gold thought it would last a good bit longer. He hypothesized Earth's methane is primordial, dating to the origin of the planet (as with other planets in the solar system). There would be a virtually limitless supply. http://metaresearch.org/publications/bulletin/2007issues/091...

That's disputed. Carbon storage might have stopped quickly wheen wood devouring fungi evolved. http://news.clarku.edu/news/2012/06/28/findings-point-to-fun...

There are hydrocarbons (methane especially) on other planets. Oil is old algae, but methane might not be - there is a lot of energy in the Earth's core than can make it.

Tell that to the algae in the ocean. Anyway we won't run out of fossils. But I am hopeful for replacement. We almost tamed production, battery tech is progressing. The only hard place for fossil fuels to be replaced if push comes to shove is air travel.

Australia has gone all-in on natural gas, it is in track to be the worlds biggest gas exporter.

Is that a problem in the face of falling hydrocarbon prices? Yes, yes it is.

This thing probably remains profitable because of the economies of scale. Other projects, pipelines, etc? We shall see.

The resources industry accelerates like a race car and stops like and ocean liner. Which leads to decadal wild price swings and associated profitability. But it would have a long expected lifetime and will all add up. The need for gas isn't going anywhere over the long run.

It makes me wonder about the understanding of game theory in the resources industry. Currently big iron ore producers are increasing their output in response to falling prices, hoping to put smaller players out of business, but reducing their own margins in the process due to oversupply.

LNG prices vary a lot around the globe, so, wherever they are highest is where the LNG ships will deliver it.

Right now I believe Japan and other parts of Asia pay a lot more for LNG than say, the USA does.

Actually this PDF shows the disparity quite nicely: http://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/othr-mkts/lng/othr-lng-...

And with the location of the Prelude's operation being just north of Australia, you will note that the highest-priced areas are quite close by.

for science fiction fans, it's significantly longer than a general products #4 spaceship hull (300m), though the hull being a sphere gives it a greater volume.

Anyone else read that as "wessel" with a fake Russian accent?

Don't be so proud of this technological terror you've constructed.

The ability to produce 3.6m tonnes of LNG annually while at sea is, uh, well that's actually pretty kick ass.

But I'll bet none of the crew have light sabers.

The timing of this debut is hilarious to me. So, they build the largest boat to increase the exportation of oil but, simultaneously the need for oil is diminishing. I don't care what forecasters have to say because, at the end of the day oil prices will definitely continue to sink. It may go up for a while, but it surely will sink. Renewable energies are taking their market by storm and destroying the need for the anti-green oil industry. For example, India, a country that in theory could add extremely large value to oil, is one of the fastest growing renewable energy markets in the world. Not to mention, other countries with a smaller potential demand are doing the same. I love the idea of "the new biggest ship", but it's purpose humours me

It's for natural gas, not oil. It's a huge liquefaction facility for LNG.

Did you read the article? It is producing gas, not oil. It is much easier to move gas from Australia to China than from North America.

That whole comment was a mistake. I completely missed the point's of the article.

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