A Major Milestone in the Life of Nakilat

On April 5, 2007, a major milestone in the life of Nakilat was realized. The Steel Cutting Ceremony for the first Q-Max vessel, a 266,000 m3 LNG carrier being built at Samsung Heavy Industries in Korea. This vessel will be the first 100% wholly owned vessel for Nakilat. This ceremony marks the start of the construction of what will be the largest LNG carrier ever built at the time of delivery in August 2008.

To transport the LNG for Qatargas II, a 2-train LNG project expected to deliver 15 million tones of LNG per annum, predominantly to the UK gas market, - 8 Q-Flex vessels (for Train 4) and 6 Q-Max vessels (for Train 5) will be built in Korean shipyards. Four of the Q-flex vessels will be jointly owned between Nakilat and OSG, and four will be jointly owned between Nakilat, Pronav and various German “KGs”. All of the vessels for Train 5 will be wholly owned by Nakilat. This keeps on track Nakilat’s intention of becoming the largest LNG ship owning company in the world.

These state of the art vessels have incorporated design features not previously associated with LNG carriers, such as twin slow speed diesel engines with twin propeller and dual rudder systems, as well as a reliquefaction plant to liquefy the boil off gas and return it to the cargo tanks. They will also be the first LNG vessels to incorporate ‘clean agent’ fire fighting systems in public places on board, replacing CO2 as a fire fighting medium. All the critical machinery on board has been duplicated, making these ships amongst the safest and most reliable LNG vessels ever built.

Upon the completion of the current ship building program in early 2010, Nakilat is scheduled to take delivery of 25 wholly owned vessels, consisting of 14 Q-Max vessels and 11 Q-Flex vessels, which, in addition to the Qatargas II project will be used to transport LNG for other Qatargas and RasGas projects.

Throughout this construction program, great emphasis is placed on the safety of personnel. The Incident and Injury Free philosophy is one which unites all the parties involved in the Qatargas and RasGas projects, including Nakilat, the other ship-owners and the ship-builders. Only by constantly striving to remain incident free and ensure that all personnel working on the projects return home safely to their families every day, can the program be considered a complete success. The aim is to assist all the contractors and suppliers to commit to the highest SHE & Quality principles and establish such programs in their activities to meet these high standards.

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