10 July 2015
INEOS-US Gas to Europe-Building the Ships
DETAILS
The INEOS Dragon Ships
are part of a grand scheme, global in scale, breath-taking in vision.
INEOS is investing more than $1bn
to ship 800,000 tons a year of US Gas to Europe.
“People said it couldn’t be done.
At INEOS we believe everything is possible.”
Jim Ratcliffe
In 2011 INEOS was faced with a stark challenge.
Its US petrochemicals businesses were booming,
fuelled by cheap ethane from shale gas.
At the same time the European businesses
faced increasing competitive pressure.
* In Scotland, North Sea gas supplies were close to exhaustion and
* in Norway restricted availability of volumes
would be unable to fulfil our potential increasing demand.
If nothing was done, there was a risk
the Scottish businesses could close, taking thousands of jobs with it.
For Norway, we had to ensure that
the business has a long-term future
within the realm of low cost competition
from US and Mid East markets.
The only way to save the European businesses was US gas.
But you can’t build a 3000 mile subsea pipeline.
So the answer was a shipping fleet
to create a virtual pipeline across the Atlantic,
connecting gas reserves
with the businesses that desperately needed them.
The only problem was that no-one had ever shipped ethane
that far and in those quantities.
LNG has been shipped around the world for decades.
Ethane though is a different matter.
It had only ever been shipped in small vessels on short routes.
Crossing the Atlantic would need much bigger boats.
Other companies felt it simply wasn’t viable.
But INEOS saw the opportunity and
had the vision to make it happen.
This short film, the second in the Big Boats series moves
from the design of the vessels
to the construction of the INEOS fleet.
“People said it couldn’t be done.
At INEOS we believe everything is possible.”
Jim Ratcliffe
WWW.CHEMWINFO.COM BY KHUN PHICHAI
