Launching his FLNG - The Floating Phenomenon report in Perth yesterday, a joint initiative with the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, Stickells said expertise and knowledge developed locally for Prelude FLNG and other gas projects was now of huge value in the international marketplace.

 

The key, he said, was to capitalise on that innovation leadership position.

 

While the role of FLNG was hotly debated over the past decade, with a WA parliamentary inquiry evaluating the local economic benefits around Woodside Petroleum's proposition for Browse, Engineers Australia always maintained that the real opportunities would come in the operations and maintenance phase.

 

And while that still rings true as LNG projects move from construction towards O&M, Stickells identified even broader benefits, with Perth-developed technologies being deployed in 10 of Shell's projects globally.

 

"We talked about [FLNG] revolutions two years ago, now it's one of many options being developed to further gas developments," Stickells told Energy News.

 

"It was a much more pointed, with enquiries and questions in government about local benefits.

 

"Now we've reached past that and we now know we have demonstrated expertise that's working along the value chain that's also spinning off other relevant activities.

 

"The expertise supporting the anchoring systems for Prelude is looking at offshore renewable energy structures in the North Sea and is looking at new technologies that support other structures in the ocean."

 

While in Australia FLNG has been studied for Browse, Bonaparte, Scarborough and a number of other offshore gas fields, RISC's Perth-based principal Martin Wilkes that Prelude would likely be the first and last of its kind seen in the country.

 

However, that doesn't mean the benefits to the local economy aren't still gushing forth, they're just not there in the ways that were expected to be visible.

 

"What's hard in this area is that we're used to seeing high-vis jobs in the construction phase we're just finishing off now, and that's how we think of benefits, but we need to consider how we secure value from better designs, safer operations, optimisation, asset management, monitoring, and those sorts of things," Stickells told Energy News.

 

"We're developing the responses to those challenges."

 

He said UWA's laboratories simulate cyclones in subsea conditions, use geotechnical centrifuges to model and design new offshore structures, and its chemical engineers are re-defining the operating parameters for LNG plants.  

 

"Advances in computing and sensing are transforming our knowledge of geology - the extraction of hydrocarbons is now a complex and data-intensive computational science as much as it is a feat of technical engineering," he told yesterday's report launch.

 

"This expertise is also providing key support for the development of FLNG and we have an array of opportunities to build on this deep engagement with industry."

 

Altered optimism

 

He said the FLNG revolution trumpeted with great optimism prior to the global oil price collapse is now viewed very differently. 

 

As Prelude emerges from South Korea's Geoje shipyard with great anticipation, FLNG facilities are also being deployed offshore Columbia, Cameroon and Malaysia, and soon Equatorial Guinea.  

 

Petronas loaded its first cargo in east Malaysia last month, becoming the first company to produce LNG from a floating production unit, and it has just announced its second FLNG facility will be operational in 2020. 

 

The Shell-operated Prelude facility will be the largest - in terms of production (3.6 million tonnes per annum) and size (488m long) when operating. 

 

Stickells said Prelude, and the gas industry in Australia more generally, had been the catalyst for an enormous upsurge in technology development, research, skills training and business development, particularly in Perth. 

 

"Insights into this upswing and the benefits arising are illustrated in the reports as well as what we should be doing now to ensure the substantial opportunities are maximised," Stickells said.

 

"Backfill of gas projects may make FLNG in the short to medium term less viable [in WA], but there are other developments - Petronas just announced another one to follow up by 2020.

 

"It's a global business and we have expertise in WA that's working globally."