Operators, financiers, contractors, engineers, lawyers and the full supply chain convened at the magnificent London offices of Norton Rose Fulbright to address one of the most commercially consequential questions in global energy: how do you extract, liquefy, store and distribute hydrocarbons and clean fuels from offshore platforms faster, cheaper and with fewer regulatory headaches than before?

Gas is back, and it’s floating

David Boggs, Executive Director of Energy Maritime Associates, opened proceedings with a precise read of the global offshore landscape. The numbers are compelling. FLNG capacity is projected to more than triple by 2030, with six-MTPA projects now advancing in Canada and Argentina. A decade ago, Shell’s Prelude was a curiosity. Today, proven FLNG assets are being redeployed across continents, and the sector is shifting from ‘can it be done?’ to ‘how fast can it scale?’

Gas is the driver. Projects are skewing heavily toward LNG rather than oil, particularly as energy buyers and producers respond to persistent geopolitical volatility and supply diversification strategies. The message from the floor was unambiguous: supply security is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a board-level mandate.

Cobie Loper of NOV, Boyd Howell of MODEC and Ian Crehan of Lloyd’s Register, mapped out the implications. Supply chain constraints, particularly on long-lead rotating equipment, remain the most immediate bottleneck to project timelines. Operators are responding by moving earlier into procurement conversations, treating the supply chain as a strategic rather than operational priority.

Money, risk and the art of the bankable deal

Session two went straight to the commercial engine room. Eleanor Martin, a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, set out the contracting landscape. EPC versus Lease & Operate versus BOT structures each carry different risk profiles, different capital requirements, and different bankability hurdles. Getting the incentive alignment right, the ‘carrots and sticks’, is where deals live or die.

The financing panel that followed brought in voices from Citi, ABN AMRO, Samos Energy and Wison New Energies. Alfred Butrous of Citi confirmed that while some ECAs are retreating from oil and gas exposure, private capital is stepping in with genuine appetite. Charles Furness-Smith of Samos Energy was candid: private investors want contract structure, counterparty quality and residual asset value: in that order. FPSO capital costs have roughly doubled in fifteen years; the economics must be constructed carefully from day one.

Ann-Christin Stucke of ABN AMRO raised the ESG dimension. Not as a barrier. But as a filter shaping which projects attract the most competitive financing terms. The practical upshot: projects that address ESG proactively gain access to a broader and often cheaper capital pool.

Why some deals cross the line and others don’t

Session three tackled one of the forum’s most debated questions: why do some offshore developments reach FID quickly, while others are rebid multiple times? Steve Gardyne of Amplus Energy offered a case study in pragmatic alignment, the PJ-1/Finder KTJ project in Southeast Asia, as an example of what happens when developers, contractors and vessel owners build a genuine framework for commercial alignment from FEED through to end of field life.

The FLNG-specific panel, which united Sinan Klkety of Wison New Energies and David Boggs, highlighted the sector’s maturation. Standardisation is gaining ground. Wison’s SPB-based design is making a credible case that repeatability reduces both cost and schedule risk. Golar LNG’s Adel Alebady confirmed that their FLNG units are delivering above nameplate capacity, with capex in the $500–600 per ton range, meaningfully competitive against US liquefaction benchmarks of $800–1,300 per ton.

Operability, or the ability to safely moor and offload in real sea conditions, emerged as the critical siting constraint. Captain Tony Heffernan of RWE Supply & Trading drew on years of LNG vessel operations to make the point simply: if you cannot bring the LNG carrier safely alongside, the project economics collapse regardless of how attractive the resource is.

Sweat the asset, don’t replace it

Session four shifted focus to existing infrastructure. The challenge facing many operators is clear: decommissioning is expensive, and field extensions require justification. The answer emerging across the sector combines digital tools with novel engineering.

ABB’s Lijie Li and DNV’s Conn Fagan explored how digital twins and AI-driven predictive maintenance are transforming the economics of life extension. Condition-based maintenance, properly implemented, can defer costly interventions and extend productive asset life well beyond original design parameters.

The session also showcased a genuinely novel piece of engineering: an unmanned floating facility for chemical injection and control across long-distance gas tiebacks. The concept, deploying a utility buoy to inject corrosion, wax and scale inhibitors without a long-distance static umbilical, addresses one of the persistent cost headaches in subsea tie-back development. The key insight: by avoiding the need to store large volumes of methanol or MEG on the buoy, the solution remains compact, low-cost and commercially viable.

Ammonia, hydrogen and floating nuclear

The final session pushed into territory that would have seemed speculative five years ago. LD Armateurs presented FRESH. This is a floating ammonia terminal and hydrogen production platform designed to solve the storage and distribution bottleneck that currently constrains green ammonia trade. With green ammonia volumes expected to exceed 100 million tonnes per annum by 2050 and a 50% compound annual growth rate forecast in the near term, the logistics challenge is real and growing. FRESH offers a floating, mobile, multi-function solution: storage, coastal distribution, ship-to-ship bunkering, and hydrogen cracking. And all deployable in roughly three years from contract signature.

André Steenhuis of Allseas, Mark Tipping of Lloyd’s Register and Sarah McCann of NorthStandard examined the case for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors in offshore power and UK port applications. The regulatory and safety frameworks are still forming, but the commercial logic is sharpening as energy security concerns intensify.

A closing delegate poll via the Slido polling system, sponsored by Amplus Energy, asked which technology was most likely to materially change the floating energy landscape by 2030. The answer was emphatic: FLNG capacity tripling, restructuring the global gas supply chain and creating new monetisation pathways at scale.

Those key conversations

The event was more than the sum of its conference sessions. It was about the conversations in the margins during the structured networking breaks. Here delegates were able to get a clear picture of which counterparties are actively seeking deals, which lenders are open for business, and which contractors are ready to move. Judging by the buzz that carried on well into the evening, there is little doubt that relationships built over the NOV-sponsored coffee breaks, MODEC-sponsored lunch and Samos Energy Group-sponsored evening drinks reception will be resurfacing in term sheets in the near future.

The Floating Energy Forum was jointly organised by Energy Maritime Associates and Riviera Maritime Media. The event sponsors were: Amplus Energy, Lloyd’s Register, MODEC, NOV and Samos Energy Group.

For more information on Riviera’s year-round coverage of the subject matter and the next forum please email edwin.lampert@rivieramm.com