While the United Nations is busy scaremongering about "climate change", condemning the free market system, celebrating the official "Mother Earth Day" and discussing Bolivia´s draft treaty to give "Mother Earth" the same rights as humans (including a Ministry of Mother Earth, and providing the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state!) things are happening fast in the real world.
In several earlier posts we have described the US-led shale gas revolution. Shell has recently announced the arrival of another revolutionary natural gas development:
This is how Shell´s Malcolm Brinded (Executive Director, Upstream International) describes the world´s first off-shore facility to produce and liquefy gas:
We will be deploying this revolutionary technology first in Australian waters, over the Prelude gas field, where it will cool the produced gas into a liquid on the spot. Oceangoing carriers will then offload the LNG as well as other liquid by-products for delivery to market.
This is big, ladies and gentlemen. Not just the decision to build the FLNG facility but also the facility itself. From bow to stern, Shell’s FLNG facility will be 488 metres. That’s almost half a kilometre! It will be the largest floating offshore facility in the world – longer than four football fields laid end to end. Almost as long – or so I’m told – as three MCGs end to end. When fully equipped, and with its storage tanks full, it will weigh around 600,000 tonnes – roughly six times as much as the largest aircraft carrier.
FLNG will change the rules of the game. It will allow us to access stranded offshore gas fields that otherwise would be too costly or difficult to develop, because it avoids the need for long underwater pipelines and new coastal infrastructure.
It also enables LNG projects to go ahead more quickly and with less certainty about the volume of the gas resources being tapped, since an FLNG facility can be reused elsewhere at the end of a field’s life.
Mr. Brinded´s speech is at least a thousand times more important than all of Mr. Ban Ki-moon´s empty propaganda lectures put together when it comes to eradicating poverty in the world, because you cannot improve the lot of poor people without giving them the energy that is required for real progress.
PS
It is sad to see that the United Nations has become a playground for all kinds of leftist enviro-fundamentalists, anti-capitalist crusaders and climate change scaremongers. (Remember: the US pays 22% of the UN budget!). It is also sad, that the liberal/leftist main stream media are mostly quiet about what is going on at the UN. Neither are they properly reporting the great progress that is taking place in the world energy market.
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