STX Offshore & Shipbuilding Co. announced that the company has recently entered into a contract for 480 billion-won 1 FSO(Floating Storage Offloading) unit with a North African shipowner.

Being 3 times as big as football ground with 324m length and 51m width, the vessel is able to hold 1.5 million crude oil. This accounts for about 70% of the amount of crude oil used a day in Korea.

The ship is scheduled to be delivered by the first half of 2015 after being constructed at STX's Dalian shipbuilding complex in China, where the company has the world's largest marine plant construction platform.

STX Dalian shipyard has a lot of experiences in marine plant sector including pipe laying barge, drill ship and ultra large FSO. Particularly 'Noble Globetrotter', a compact drill ship that was built in STX Dalian, was ever credited as one of the best drill ships by getting a perfect score at the world's drill ship evaluation.

“We are going to take this opportunity as full entry into a ultra large marine plant business." said a staff of STX.

STX successfully delivered a 2.2 million barrel FSO early this year to the oil company that placed the order in 2008.