HOUSTON (Nov 14): Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s Turritella set sail from Singapore on Tuesday on its voyage to the Gulf of Mexico, where it will become the deepest floating production, storage and offloading vessel in the world.

The 274-meter-long (900-feet-long) ship is about 500 miles west of Malaysia in the Indian Ocean, on its 13,000-mile (21,000-kilometer) journey to the Stones field about 200 miles south of coastal Louisiana. Once the vessel arrives, it will still take several months of work to connect it to subsea infrastructure nearly two miles below the surface, Shell spokeswoman Kim Windon said by phone from Houston. Production is slated to begin sometime in 2016.

The first phase will eventually hook up eight wells to the vessel, producing oil and gas equivalent to about 50,000 barrels a day, according to Shell. The gas will be piped to shore while the oil will be loaded directly from the vessel to tankers bound for U.S. coastal refineries.

Gulf of Mexico oil production has risen 13 percent this year as projects begun years ago have come online, even as oil prices have fallen more than 50 percent from their 2014 peak amid a global supply glut. A dozen projects are expected to come online in the Gulf this year and next, increasing output by a combined 200,000 barrels of oil a day, according to the Energy Information Administration.