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Shell's (SHEL) Prelude FLNG Restarts First Cargo Since Fire

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Shell (SHEL - Free Report) recently announced the restart of liquefied natural gas (LNG - Free Report) cargoes from its Prelude floating LNG (FLNG - Free Report) facility offshore Australia, following a temporary fire-related technical outage in December.

According to Shell, the fire was promptly put out and the area was declared safe; it also stated that no one was hurt and all of the facility's workers were safe and well.

Following a small fire at the 3.6M metric tons/year facility, Prelude, the largest floating plant for natural gas liquefaction in the world, had paused its gas production last month due to an ongoing investigation.

The most recent incident happened only a year after a similar fire forced the vessel to go down for nearly five months. The unit was also offline from June to September 2022 due to industrial action by the workers protesting for enhanced pay.

Prelude FLNG has a minimum annual liquid production capacity of 5.3 million tons per annum (mtpa), which includes 3.6 mtpa of LNG, 1.3 mtpa of condensate, and 0.4 mtpa of liquefied petroleum gas. With a 67.5% ownership in the facility, Shell is the largest shareholder.

Zacks Rank and Key Picks

Headquartered in London, Shell is one of the primary oil supermajors, a group of U.S. and Europe-based big energy multinationals with operations spanning worldwide.

Currently, Shell carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Meanwhile, investors interested in the energy sector might look at stocks like Patterson-UTI Energy (PTEN - Free Report) and Helmerich & Payne (HP - Free Report) , both sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and RPC Inc. (RES - Free Report) , holding a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Patterson-UTI Energy: PTEN beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings in three of the last four quarters. The company has a trailing four-quarter earnings surprise of roughly 169.23%, on average.

Patterson-UTI is worth approximately $3.47 billion. Its shares have gained 63.4% in the past year.

Helmerich & Payne: Helmerich & Payne is valued at around $4.95 billion. Over the past 60 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for HP's fiscal 2023 earnings has been revised 18.8% higher.

Helmerich & Payne, headquartered in Tulsa, OK, has a trailing four-quarter earnings surprise of roughly 124.22%, on average. In the past year, the HP stock has increased by 67.1%.

RPC: RPC Inc. beat earnings estimates in all the trailing four quarters, the average being around 62%. The market capitalization of RES is $1.87 billion.  In the past year, the RES stock has increased by 53.9%

Digging into valuation, RPC currently has a Forward P/E ratio of 6.53. For comparison, its industry has an average Forward P/E of 22.57, which means RPC is trading at a discount to the group.

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