ExxonMobil Technology Makes Breakthrough with World's Largest LNG Carrier

Rig Zone ^ | December 17, 2008 | Exxon Mobil Corp

[Cronos]

I’m guessing most of the gas will go to Asian customers.

[noah]

Goodness sakes! Don’t they think about INSURANCE?? Especially in these Troublesome times, PIRATES, Terrorists ETC?

[Red Badger]

Then this is CHANGE we can BLEVE in?.............

[thackney]

I’m guessing most of the gas will go to Asian customers.

Not all of it.

[thackney]

Yes it will explode. It called a BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion) and they are particularly nasty.

A myth for LNG.

In laboratory and open ocean combustion tests, there have been no documented cases of LNG BLEVEs. It is a theory that has never been capable of being produced and has been tested several times. LNG SAFETY MYTHS and LEGENDS http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/02/ngt/Quillen.pdf

[GonzoGOP]

Point taken, I never said it was likely, just that it was possible. Any liquid that can be boiled off into a flammable gas can be made to BLEVE if you can dump enough heat into a pressurized container. You could put corn oil into an old steam engine boiler, bolt down the safety valve, and heat it over a roaring fire for a few hours (or more likely days) and eventually it would burst the boiler and BLEVE.

Its just a matter of dumping enough heat into the tank to overwhelm the safety valve and cause the tank walls to fail catastrophically. Oddly enough the larger the tank the less likely it is to BLEVE because of the amount of heat that you would need to add to get the tank to fail. And hitting the tank with a missile would just allow the tank to vent faster, hence as you pointed out a fire not an explosion. I agree that it is hard to imagine a way of getting that much heat onto the a ship that size for long enough to get it to explode. Of course its also hard to blow up a carbon core nuclear reactor but the Russians did it by running the reactor at full power, with all of the safety systems deactivated and the cooling pumps turned off.

[thackney]

Add to that posibility the insulation and double hull construction of an LNG carrier. Most, if not all, designs use space between the insulated LNG pressure vessels and ships outer hull as water ballast tanks.

It is significantly different than a propane carrier.