A big boat and some excessive capitals

Fuel giant Shell says this month will see the successful implementation of a project that they hope will revolutionise natural gas production - and it involves a rather large boat...

Motivation. Unfortunately something the Science lite desk has but a passing acquaintance with, yet even we are aware that it can usually be boiled down to several key ingredients – and money is more often than not the king, and indeed queen, of driving forces. And so it appears to be for one of the biggest science and engineering projects being undertaken at the moment.

Fuel giant Shell says this month will see the successful implementation of a project that they hope will revolutionise natural gas production. Now, they say that there are several environmental benefits to the project, but the real nub of the matter is the vast amount of money they stand to make from it. You see, they want to tap into an enormous gas field off the coast of western Australia that is unsullied by any other company pipelines. Why so virginal? Well, it is located 250m under the sea in an area known as ‘cyclone alley’.  Hmm – should alarm bells be ringing at this point? It has become increasingly clear that large-scale energy production and extreme natural events do not mix particularly well.

That said, some incredibly advanced science and technology has been utilised in the project, and some 600 people around the world have spent over 1.6 million hours working on the problem – and what of their findings? An innovative pipeline perhaps? An advanced submersible? A pod of highly trained gas-collecting dolphins? Nope, pleasingly – for us at least – they have built THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SHIP!

The Prelude platform is 488m long – that is longer than 4 football pitches. When fully loaded it’ll weigh 600,000 tonnes – six times the weight of the largest aircraft carrier

Now, it is kind of an unwritten law that writers should not really refer to the little devices they employ in order to get a sentence to covey meaning. A skilfully constructed sentence should leave you not only with information, but also the emotional context with-in which that information should be set. There are many tricks writers use to do this, and expertly applied they can be a thing of joy. However, it is pretty much universally understood by those in the word game that simply capitalising the words upon which he or she intends to hang an emphasis is a big no no. And so for that we apologise, but some things are simply beyond subtlety, and THE WORLDS BIGGEST SHIP! surely falls under that category?

Now whilst all this might sound a little bit like we are trying to convince the Editor to stop throwing our work back at us – the truth is that this particular ship seems to warrant capitals. Let’s have a look at the numbers. Known as the Prelude platform, it is 488m long – that is longer than 4 football pitches. When fully loaded it’ll weigh 600,000 tonnes – six times the weight of the largest aircraft carrier. And the real kicker – its 200 strong crew will be ferried back and forth by 6 return flights a week.

By now the vessel should be anchored off the West coast of Australia, where it will be used to harvest natural gas from Shell’s Prelude field. Once the gas is on board, it will be cooled until it liquefies and stored in vast tanks at -161°C. This is something of a special trick – ordinarily this has to be done back on dry land. But Prelude can do the job herself – another in a series of firsts for the behemoth. Every six or seven days a huge tanker will dock beside the platform and load up enough fuel to heat a city the size of London for a week.

Whichever way you look at it, it is a big boat. In fact big doesn’t really do it justice – nor do any superlatives we can currently think of to be honest. Time to break another writing rule­ – time for some excessive word-compounding. Ginormohuge, Enormassive – yes, they both seem to define this leviathan fairly well.

So to sum up – the world’s biggest ship, which will suck up gas from the seabed only to cool it to -161°C in order to produce millions of tonnes of liquefied gas, is positioned in one of the world’s stormiest seas a mere 200km from western Australia’s beautiful Kimberley coastline – we can’t decide if this is human ingenuity at its greatest or its most foolhardy, but whichever it is, it definitely warrants capitals.