Speaking during a Gastalk event on Thursday, Wood Mackenzie principal analyst Saul Kavonic said FLNG has burst onto the scene, but the current constriction of gas markets and low prices will put a hold on future development of these mega-vessels.

"For me, 2017 was the year of FLNG," Mr Kavonic said.

"We saw the first ever delivery of LNG produced from Petronas [PFLNG 1 Satu vessel], and Shell's Prelude FLNG completed in the yards in Korea and begin commissioning [200 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia]," he said.

"Mozambique has also taken to FLNG with [Eni East Africa's] Coral South, and its volumes are already secured."

When first floated, the potential of FLNG made economic sense as it was developed during the commodity boom, when oil was more than US$100 a barrel, and the market faced a dearth of gas and increasing demand, creating a race to get supply into the market.

Floating LNG allowed companies such as Shell - with its Prelude FLNG, the largest floating vessel on earth - to access stranded or remote assets faster, and provided them with the option to move operations when wells ran dry.

However, the rash of construction of new floating LNG facilities is unlikely to be repeated in the coming decade as a tighter gas market makes huge projects such as these less financially attractive.

Mr Kavonic said while these projects will still earn FLNG owners billions of dollars, "they will not achieve the return on revenue anywhere near what was first expected."

"There is the issue of cost challenges, and in the current market state we're unlikely to see large-scale FLNG projects being sanctioned in next five to ten years," Mr Kavonic told Fairfax Media.

He said new FLNG won't make sense until prices increase, which is unlikely to happen until mid-next decade.

This position was supported by Macquarie, which predicted a gas oversupply lasting until 2022 in a best-case scenario, or dragging out to 2027 if US shale gas continues its upward trend and Russia begins expanding its gas output.

Instead, the focus will be on the development and expansion of brownfield projects and eking out maximum productivity from existing assets.

"There's little appetite for greenfield projects, floating or otherwise."

However, there does exist the potential for near-shore FLNG projects, which allow for the quick expansion of onshore LNG trains' capacity.

Mr Kavonic said small-scale FLNG "still has a real shot".

This was supported by an industry insider, who told Fairfax Media that barges with FLNG technology could be added to aid onshore LNG trains, anchored only 10 to 100 metres offshore.

In Australia, Shell's Prelude FLNG facility is undergoing commissioning, a spokesman previously told Fairfax Media it is still on target for a projected startup in the first half of 2018, and cash flow within the year.