Golar LNG Brand Guidelines: Gotaas-Larsen Roots and the Ship-Converted Hilli FLNG

A 1946 shipping line and a carrier called Hilli.

Golar LNG traces its roots to 1946, when the Gotaas-Larsen Shipping Corporation was founded, according to the company’s own history; English Wikipedia gives the same year. Gotaas-Larsen entered the liquefied natural gas trade in 1970, the company says, by ordering an LNG carrier named Hilli, a name that would return almost half a century later on the vessel that reshaped the business.

The shipping company changed hands several times. The company’s history says the Barclay brothers bought Gotaas-Larsen in 1988 and that Osprey Maritime, which English Wikipedia describes as Singapore-based, acquired it in 1997. In 2000 World Shipholding, controlled by the shipowner John Fredriksen, began a takeover of Osprey that was completed in 2001, English Wikipedia says, and the LNG business passed to the new company. Golar describes that step as renaming the business “with the abbreviated style”: Golar LNG, formed in 2001.

The new company listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 2001 and on Nasdaq in 2002 under the ticker GLNG, English Wikipedia says; it left the Oslo exchange on 30 August 2012. The company says World Shipholding’s stake was sold to the public in 2014. Golar is incorporated in Bermuda, with its principal executive office in Hamilton, administrative offices in London and technical and operations offices in Oslo, according to its website, which also lists offices in Cameroon, Mauritania, Croatia and Malaysia. Its annual general meeting in May 2025 was held in Hamilton, LNG Prime reported, with Tor Olav Trøim re-elected to the board as chairman.

From carriers to floating plants.

Golar’s identity rests on converting ships rather than building plants on land. In 2002, the company says, it began a study with Saipem and Moss Maritime into turning an existing LNG carrier into a floating storage and regasification unit, or FSRU, and in 2005 it signed a contract with Keppel Shipyard of Singapore for what it calls the first ever such conversion. Petrobras leased the Golar Winter and the Golar Spirit as FSRUs in 2007, and the first converted unit went into operation in 2008, the company says; English Wikipedia describes the Golar Spirit as the world’s first regasification vessel converted from an LNG carrier, later sold to New Fortress Energy.

The next step was liquefaction at sea. After a design study with Keppel and Black & Veatch from 2012, Golar ordered the conversion of the carrier Golar Hilli in 2014, which it calls the world’s first floating LNG vessel converted from a ship, and took the investment decision in 2015 for an eight-year contract with Perenco in Cameroon. Renamed FLNG Hilli Episeyo, the unit sailed to Cameroon in 2017 and produced its first LNG in 2018, the company says.

Business in Cameroon reported in November 2026 that, according to Golar, Hilli produced LNG off Kribi from June 2018 to July 2026 and loaded 156 cargoes, with gas from fields including Sanaga South. The final cargo was loaded on 27 July 2026, and on 4 August the vessel left Cameroonian waters for Seatrium’s yards in Singapore. Cameroon’s national hydrocarbons company, SNH, had attributed the end of operations to the natural decline of the gas field, the paper said, and Golar had said it was open to working in the country again.

The second unit, FLNG Gimi, was converted from a 1975-built Moss-type LNG carrier, LNG Prime reported in January 2024, calling it the world’s second converted floating LNG producer. Golar had signed a 20-year agreement with BP in February 2019 to serve the Greater Tortue Ahmeyim field off Mauritania and Senegal; Gimi left Seatrium’s Singapore yard on 19 November 2023 and reached the field on 10 January 2024, the trade paper reported. The company says Gimi began commercial operations for BP in 2025.

Floating LNG.

LNG and natural-gas companies sell something few customers ever see. Gas is cooled to a liquid, carried across oceans and warmed back into gas before it reaches a power station, a factory or a kitchen, so the companies in this guide tend to present themselves through the places and machines that do that work rather than through the product itself.

For exporters, the plant is the picture. Websites and press releases show liquefaction trains, storage tanks and loading docks, often lit at dusk or photographed from the air, and describe each site by its location, acreage and capacity in million tonnes a year. Shipping and floating-terminal companies lean on their vessels instead: membrane tankers, floating storage and regasification units and floating liquefaction ships, each with its own name. Utilities and gas distributors tend to come closer to home, with blue flames, kitchen hobs and heating, and with tariffs and service pages.

The other common thread is time. Projects are told as sequences of milestones: permits, sales agreements, a final investment decision, first cargo and the start of commercial operations, each with a date. Investor presentations add capacity charts, contract tables and maps of buyers in Europe and Asia, while safety, environment and community pages, along with grievance and regulatory notices, sit alongside them, often written for the neighbours of a plant as much as for its customers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, where its plants and ships operate, and what has happened to them, including outages, disputes and changes of ownership, stated with dates. It marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word, and the colours and typefaces shown are our own unofficial interpretation, not any company’s brand standard.

A narrower company with a bigger task.

Golar has narrowed itself to floating liquefaction. In 2016 it formed Golar Power with Stonepeak and OneLNG with Schlumberger, the company says. In 2021 it sold Golar LNG Partners and Golar Power, by then renamed Hygo Energy Transition, to New Fortress Energy. It floated its carrier business as Cool Company Ltd in 2022 and exited that investment in February 2023, and it describes the 2025 sale of the carrier Golar Arctic as its exit from LNG shipping.

Its next base is Argentina. LNG Prime reported in May 2025 that Pan American Energy, Golar, YPF, Pampa Energía and Harbour Energy had taken a final investment decision on the Southern Energy floating LNG export project, with Hilli working for it under a 20-year charter. The company says the decision to send both Hilli and a second unit to Argentina was reached in 2025. That second unit is the former carrier Fuji LNG, being converted by CIMC Raffles under a 2024 contract into a 3.5 million-tonne-a-year unit of Golar’s MKII design and named FLNG Esperanza by Southern Energy, according to Golar’s results for the second quarter of 2026.

The same report, published in August 2026, said Hilli was being repositioned to Singapore for modifications ahead of its 20-year contract starting in 2027. It also announced a fourth unit: a contract with Yantai CIMC Raffles for another 3.5 million-tonne MKII, expected by the end of 2029, which Golar’s history names as a conversion of the carrier Grace Dahlia. Golar said that unit was still looking for its deployment contract.

For a design guide, Golar LNG shows how an old shipping name can turn into an industrial one, with each vessel’s name carrying the story. Compare Höegh LNG, another operator of floating terminals, and Excelerate Energy, the Texas owner of a fleet of FSRUs. For this guide we use a deep sea navy, an ice blue and a flare orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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