China’s Wison New Energies has installed the first SPB liquefied natural gas (LNG) tank on Eni’s Congo FLNG.
The company, previously known as Wison Offshore & Marine, said in a statement that the first SPB tank of the Marine XII Offshore FLNG project (Congo FLNG) was on March 2 smoothly hoisted into the hull cargo hold space at its Nantong yard.
WNE said the SPB tank, designed and constructed by the company, is the world’s largest SPB tank and it is the core equipment of the Eni Congo LNG project.
Its construction started in February 2023, with the upper and lower bodies of the tank closed in July, and completed overall installation on March 2, 2024.
The entire tank is 45 meters long, 44.9 meters wide, with a main body height of 24 meters and a total height of over 31 meters.
Also, the tank has a volume of 45,000 cubic meters, with a total weight exceeding 1,400 tons, making it the highest and largest independent hoisted component in the entire project, according to WNE.
According to the plan, the Nantong yard will complete the installation of the remaining three SPB tanks for the Congo LNG project by the end of March, WNE said.
WNE won a contract from Italy’s Eni in December 2022 to build a 380 meters long 2.4 mtpa FLNG and officially started work on the project in January last year.
It will be able to store over 180,000 cubic meters of LNG.
The FLNG will serve Eni’s Congo project which will reach an overall LNG production capacity of 3 million tons per year, or about 4.5 billion cubic meters/year, from 2025.
Eni recently shipped the first LNG cargo from its Tango floating LNG facility moored in Congolese waters.
The Italian firm purchased the 144 meters long Tango FLNG from Belgium’s Exmar and chartered the 2002-built steam turbine LNG carrier, Excalibur, to serve as an FSU for the project.
The floating LNG producer, delivered in 2017 by China’s Wison, has a liquefaction capacity of about 1 billion cubic meters per year of gas, or 0.6 mtpa, and a storage capacity of 16,100 cbm.