China’s Wison Offshore & Marine and Swiss technology company ABB have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on the development and implementation of floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) facilities.
The partners said they plan to significantly improve the production efficiency of LNG at sea by optimising and standardising the FLNG unit design.
Currently, FLNG facilities can only be built by a small number of shipbuilders due to the complexity of their construction. The advantages of FLNG units are that they eliminate the costs involved in laying pipelines for transporting gas from the field and can also be redeployed to other offshore gas fields, making them suitable for remote small and midsize subsea gas fields that would not be profitable for a land-based LNG complex.
Wison’s competence as a provider of turnkey engineering, procurement, construction, installation and commissioning (EPCIC) to the FLNG market will be coupled with ABB’s expertise in integrating electrical, control and safety systems. ABB has delivered power and automation solutions to over 70 floating production projects around the world.
“By combining our bespoke offerings, we believe we can increase productivity in greenfield developments and in doing so improve overall CAPEX efficiency,” said Wei Huaqing, assistant president of Wison Offshore & Marine.
The agreement will also utilise ABB’s project methodology, Adaptive Execution, which is said to offer complete visibility of their project, from start to finish, via a single, streamlined and centralised approach.
Cruise-Feng Li, head of ABB Energy Industries China, commented: “Adaptive execution can help unlock significant project value for FLNG customers. By designing in a modular and standardized way, and testing everything in a virtual environment, we can tackle design challenges early on, boost performance and ensure reliability of the infrastructure. This enables all the parties involved in the project to achieve more in shorter timeframes, optimising the overall delivery schedule and saving on cost.”
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