LNG

South Korea has held a ceremony for the formal hand-over of a new liquefied natural gas bunkering vessel equipped with Korean-designed and constructed cargo storage systems.

The “Blue Whale” ship was constructed at the Hyundai Heavy Industries shipyard in the southern port city of Ulsan, where the ceremony took place.

“The vessel cost 55.3 billion won ($41.7 million) and is the first vessel equipped with the Korean type KC-2 cargo storage design,” said a statement from the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

The country developed its initial LNG cargo storage technologies from 2004 to 2014, called KC-1, and several vessels adopted that system, though it never made a commercial breakthrough.

“Based on that, it launched a project in 2017 to upgrade the KC-1 system to come up with the advanced KC-2 tank design,” added the statement.

“The ‘Blue Whale’ will be able to provide 7,500 cubic metres of LNG fuel directly to vessels, compared with an average of 30 cubic metres of LNG carried by a bunkering truck,” it stated.

Long-term project

The Ministry described the construction of the “Blue Whale” as an achievement by the shipbuilding industry of 20 years of work on LNG storage issues.

Two different designs were initially developed for LNG containment tanks for vessels, the Moss design and the membrane-type tank system using thin, flexible membranes supported only by the insulated hull structure.

Other ship and tank designs also emerged, including the KC-1 design from Korea Gas Corp. and backed by three Korean shipyards but was never taken up outside Korea. The system has now been upgraded and improved and is the KC-2 system used in the “Blue Whale”.

The Moss design was first commercial storage design taken up in 1971 and is well known by its independent spherical tanks that often have the top half exposed on LNG carriers.

However, the most common membrane-tank systems have been designed by Gaztransport and Technigaz (GTT), the French technology company which charges royalties to shipyards to use its extremely successful tanks on new vessels.

Options

LNG has been a fuel option for a long time, though up until a few years ago it was confined to LNG carriers utilising the boil of gas from their cargo and smaller vessels like ferries and offshore support vessels.

LNG fuel is now part of the shipbuilding sector as part of the preferred dual-fuel options for shipowners.

There are currently 32 LNG bunkering vessels operating worldwide with most having capacity between 7,200 cubic metres and 9,200 cubic metres and with 16 other fuelling ships on the shipyard order books.

LNG bunkering is also available for vessels at almost 90 terminals and ports worldwide using methods such as quayside truck re-fuelling, ship-to-ship transfers and barge-based transfers.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has held a naming ceremony for its latest liquefied natural gas carrier newbuild ordered by Japanese trading house Mitsui & Co. to deliver shipments to Japan from the Sempra Energy-operated Cameron LNG export plant in Louisiana.