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Natural gas is fuel. And as a fuel it means energy companies, and Dick Cheney will go to great lengths to procure it.
Shell just one-upped Halliburton’s fracking rigs by announcing they’re going to build the largest man-made floating object EVER.
The floating island, err natural gas facility, will make U.S. Battle Ships look like the Navy is sailing Legos. At 600,000 metric tons the faux floating island displaces six times the amount of water the U.S.’ next-generation Ford -class super-carrier does. Also, it measures a whopping 1/3 of mile in length. That’s like playing football on five fields.
The massive floating vessel isn’t really designed to move. It will be moored in the same spot of the coast of Australia for 25 years, and tap into about 3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas according to Shell. The facility will chill the gas to -260 degrees fahrenheit�thereby shrinking its volume by 600 times, allowing it to be shipped to customers throughout Asia.
That’s right, this is being built for Asia to feed their rapidly growing energy needs. However, the technology behind the vessel is scalable, and someday we could see these enormous floating island-facilities around the world.
Oh, and they can withstand a category 5 typhoon (aka hurricane for western folk).
