A “Green” charter?
January 2007

Pacific Pioneer arrived in Qatar in 2007 to start her new contract with Shell Qatar GTL. The acronym “GTL” stands for Gas to Liquids – this process allows normal natural gas to be transformed directly into liquid fuels, such as petrol and diesel, using a hi-tech petrochemical process. Up until this new technology came along, the development of gas has been limited by the constraints of getting the product to a market. Thus gas reservoirs that were either too remote from consumers or were too small to be developed into LNG have not been exploited. With this new process it is possible to produce “ready to go” fuels anywhere in the world. We are delighted to have been chosen by Shell to assist them in this exciting new project. The ship will be providing drilling support for a few years as part of a marine spread working offshore Qatar.