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New Cargo Ship Is 488 Meters Long
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports on the construction of Prelude, a new ship that will be the world's longest vessel. It is 488 meters long and 74 meters wide, built with 260,000 tons of steel and displacing five times as much water as an aircraft carrier. Its purpose is to carry an entire natural gas processing plant as it sits over a series of wells 100 miles off the coast of Australia. Until now, it hasn't been practical to move gas that comes out of the wells with ships. The gas occupies too much volume, so it is generally piped to a facility on shore where it is processed and then shipped off to energy-hungry markets. But the Prelude can purify and chill the gas, turning it into a liquid and reducing its volume by a factor of 600. It will offload this liquid to smaller (but still enormous) carrier ships for transport.
It'd be hard for it not to given that it weighs five times as much.
If this is the mere Prelude, something truly gargantuan must appear shortly.
The headline is wrong. This is not at all a cargo ship. It's more like an free-floating platform on which a gas refinery has been built. It will stay in place during its entire lifetime.
It should not even be compared to ships.
162 C below zero
What I wonder is how long it will be before some mega rich person(s) decides to build a semi-permanent offshore city, not so much a rig, more a case of a huge boat that is actually anchored to the ground and you take boats TO it.
There'd be loads of technical hurdles, but given the sheer size of such a construction, the issues of waves would be lesser, more so if it is designed properly to deal with them. (not to mention the use of large-scale wave guides similar in design to metamaterials, which is being tested on some oil rigs last I remember)
Somebody even wrote up a technical manual about this.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
One typhoon later Deepwater Horizon will look like child's play in comparison.
Well its a good thing that this floating facility is not in the pacific then.
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Gob forbid all that natural gas leak into the water? Who will clean up a natural gas slick?
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Is this 2004?
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I can imagine Falcon 9 mistakenly trying to land on that ship. A not so happy end for both the ship and the rocket.
Surprisingly nothing!
To things explode, you need combustible and oxidant. You have only the combustible, and the oxigen from air is not enough to make the shipo explode. And if you look closely, the well are deep underwater.
Well now my oldest will be interested in a different ship other than the Maersk Triple Es. In his mind the bigger the better, so things like the Bagger 288, Big Muskie, The Captian, and the Cat 797 are the best things ever created.
Time to offend someone
What I wonder is how long it will be before some mega rich person(s) decides to build a semi-permanent offshore city, not so much a rig, more a case of a huge boat that is actually anchored to the ground and you take boats TO it.
It will happen approximately 47 years ago.
I live in a port city and see lots of ships, but I'm not sure this baby could even enter the harbour here.
It's far bigger than what the Panama Canal can handle (maximum 290 meters long), as well as the Saint Lawrence Seaway (225 meters). The Panama Canal was designed for the largest ships of the day, RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic.
...laura
Tasman sea (where it is going first) still has 'cyclones' I believe.
It's supposed to be able to deal with a 100+ year storm (185 km / hr winds IIRC). Not that I want to sitting on untold tons of explosives and and things that spark when they break in a hurricane / cyclone, but that's just me.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
what could go wrong with a fire nozzle like that attached to a natural gas well?
Here you just might have an earth shattering 'kaboom'.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There's quite a bit of rounded edges on that ship. Watch out, Apple might sue.
nt
Sealand isn't exactly a city, or visited by the mega rich.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It reminds me of Nostromo and its cargo.
Sure hoping for a better outcome.
... Smothsonian channel will spend two episodes to cover it in Mighty Ships series. Wonder who watches that thing. It keeps showing up in the listings, but do people really watch them?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What I wonder is how long it will be before some mega rich person(s) decides to build a semi-permanent offshore city, not so much a rig, more a case of a huge boat that is actually anchored to the ground and you take boats TO it.
There'd be loads of technical hurdles, but given the sheer size of such a construction, the issues of waves would be lesser, more so if it is designed properly to deal with them. (not to mention the use of large-scale wave guides similar in design to metamaterials, which is being tested on some oil rigs last I remember)
I'm not sure what the benefit of that would be over the very large mega-yachts the super-rich currently use - they're mobile, so they get the benefits of going to places around the world in luxury, plus being able to move out of the way of bad weather, etc.
I suppose the possible sheer _scale_ of a floating city has an appeal as a display of wealth to some.
I bet these guys couldn't beleive their luck when Putin anounced he was cancelling the European gas pipleline a few weeks ago.
Be interesting to see some pollution metrics for this things processing.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If one reads Gcaptian, this and other maritime news is old hat. Here is a real ship (travels under it's own power) that is quite large. http://gcaptain.com/giant-piet...
Passionately Indifferent
Something this size would be hard to miss.
SpaceX to Prelude: Incoming!
What could possibly go wrong?
No brain, no pain.
So what's the answer? And don't put it on "brilliant engineering minds" to figure something out for you. Tell us what a good, economical, and environmentally sound option should be.
1. Renewables? A massive decrease in the cost of petroleum does not make the economics of renewables, especially solar, more attractive.
2. Nuclear? Good luck convincing regulatory bodies, the population, and environmentalists that's the best way to go. Besides, nuclear waste is a real problem, and we are in the perpetual state of "a few years more" to achieving the fast breeder reactors.
3. Fusion? Not technically possible right now, but you never know, maybe with "another 10 years" and we'll have it.
4. Force demand to be lower by using quotas or raising electricity price artificially? Yay, big government regulation causing dramatic changes in how people will live their lives. I'm sure everyone will just love being told to stop using heaters in the winter and air conditioners in the summer.
5. Carbon tax? Yay, big government regulation. Guess who profits from "carbon exchanges?" Goldman Sachs.
6. Kill off tons of people thereby reducing energy demand? Go for it, Mr. Eugenics. Just remember, killing people also takes energy expenditure in one way or another.
Nothing is easy.
It is 488 meters long and 74 meters wide
Yeah... but, how many football stadiums is that?
This ship is a marvel, and showcases the truly impressive capabilities of modern shipbuilding industry. What isn’t mentioned, but is equally impressive, is the rate at which such shipyards can turn out new ships, and the surprisingly low cost. However, one can’t help but lament that this capability isn’t being used to produce ThorCon reactors, instead of draining resources for a quick profit. (Do have a look at the white paper, it provides fascinating perspective.)
This LNG ship extracts and condenses 3.6 million tonnes of natural gas per year, with an energy density of 55.5 MJ/kg, giving:
3.6e6 tonnes/year * 1e3 kg/tonne * 55.5 MJ/kg = 199.8e9 MJ/year
or 199.8e9 MJ/year * MWh/3600 MJ * TWh/1e6MWh = 55.5 TWh/year
This yearly energy content represents a continuous power output of:
199.8e9 MJ/year * GJ/1e3 MJ * year/(365.2425*24*3600)s = 6.33 GW
That is the equivalent of a few large power plants. In the scheme of global energy requirements though, it barely registers: world energy consumption in 2008 was 143,851 TWh.
Now, given the energy density of Uranium/Thorium at 80e6 MJ/kg, the energy contained within that 3.6 million tonnes of LNG could instead be derived from:
199.8e9 MJ/year * kg/80e6 MJ * tonne/1e3 kg = 2.5 tonnes (of U or Th)
That is a rather small number, but lets put it in terms of volume. With Uranium at 1.5e9 MJ/L, or Thorium at 9.3e8 MJ/L, that amounts to roughly the size of a yoga ball:
U: 199.8e9 MJ * L/1.5e9 MJ = 133L (sphere of radius 32cm)
Th: 199.8e9 MJ * L/9.3e8 MJ = 215L (sphere of radius 37cm)
The fun part happens when you scale it back up to the global energy consumption of 143,851 TWh, and it translates to a meager 6500 tonnes per year, capable of replacing the billions of tons of fossil fuels we consume today. Even with projected growth, global energy demands could still be satisfied by a single mine, to say nothing of the billions of tons of uranium available in seawater. Before that is necessary, the tens of thousands of tons of so-called “nuclear waste” can be consumed, as they still contain ~95% of the original energy content.
The Browse Basin is within Australia's 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The cynic in me wonders if Australia signed away a nominal lease on the region while assuming there would be income from the port facilities & import/export taxes. Now instead of pumping the stuff onto shore Shell can load directly onto ocean-going ships. I for one hope the Australian contracts are water-tight (pun intended).
It's not worth it because of maintenance costs. Large ships have extremely complex structures which require constant ongoing maintenance and stops for significant maintenance once every few years at the very least.
Modern large yachts that billionaires own are typically the "optimal" in terms of size in that they're big enough to basically have about as much room as a city block without being prohibitively difficult to maintain and require consistent downtime.
Solutions (so sensible that they are guaranteed political suicide):
1. A carbon tax, starting off modest, but with a growth escalator built in and known in advance to assist planning of transition.
Note: Since we know the economy did ok with oil priced double what it is now, the carbon tax need not start out so modest. It could be adaptive, so that for example retail gasoline prices are made roughly what they just were over the last 5 years (average), as a starting point for the tax to kick off system-transition investments.
Carbon trading is not a viable option. A simple at-source carbon tax is more effective and more transparent. Carbon trading is too easily gamed by accountants at the expense of physical reality. e.g. giving you credit for the forest you haven't chopped down yet (how nice of you) so that I can continue to burn more coal.
2.One third of proceeds of carbon tax used to reduce income tax, to keep the economy stimulated.
3. One third of carbon tax revenue used to fund R&D into bleeding-edge alternative energy and transportation technologies.
e.g. better PV, better batteries, hyperloop, magnetized target fusion, thorium, novel grid-scale energy storage, smart-grid, superconducting supergrid
4. One third of carbon tax revenue used to fund non-fossil-fuel infrastructure projects with current technology. Examples:
a) Rapid transit
b) High-speed rail links
c) Energy-efficient building technology (LEED, Passivhaus) - regulations for all new construction, and subsidies
d) Geothermal Energy Projects. Redirect oil&gas industry drilling know-how and workers.
e) Significant feed-in tariffs for clean renewables (as done previously in Germany)
f) Other incentives for solar farms and solar thermal plants with molten-salt energy storage
f) Other incentives for residential PV and solar water heating
g) Deployment of grid-scale storage initially using existing technologies including Li-ion and sodium sulphur batteries, pumped hydro, underground pumped hydro.
h) Addition of long-distance HVDC power transmission lines long enough to cross weather systems. Encourages wind power and solar by evening out intermittency.
i) Expanded subsidy of electric vehicle purchase.
j) Electric vehicle charging infrastructure expansion
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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