• 03 May 2018

Finnish shipping company Containerships is pushing forward with its plans to boost the use of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as fuel for ships and trucks in order to reduce emissions and meet tightening IMO regulations, investing up to 200 million euros ($239.5m) in LNG technology over the next five years, the largest singular investment in company’s history.

The company has currently four new dual-fuel container vessels under construction at Guangzhou Wenchong Shipyard in China. The short-sea vessels have a capacity of 1,400 TEU and will be operating in the Baltic and Nordic seas.

The first newbuild, M/S Containerships Nord, is scheduled for delivery during the first half of 2018. It will then be followed by one vessel every eight weeks after the previous one. All vessel will be in operation on the beginning of  2019.

Containerships participates in the Trans European Network-Transport (TEN-T)  as main coordinator of the DOOR2LNG project, with the objective  to turn the multimodal door-to-door logistic chain to LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) in Northern Europe, which sees the participation of other members such as GNS Shipping, Multilink Terminals, PD Ports and RST.

The  project was granted 17 million Euro, of which MEUR 10  allocated to build four new LNG fuelled vessels for North and Baltic Sea operations and MEUR 7 to upgrade the port infrastructure and develop cargo handling capacity in core ports of Helsinki, Rotterdam and Teesport.

With regard to land transportation, the company made the most progress in the UK, where it had 40 LNG trucks in use at the end of 2017 and plans to increase the fleet size of LNG-fuelled trucks to 200 by 2020.

Containerships also opened its own LNG refuelling station on the company’s premises at Teesport in May 2017, which serves Containerships’ growing fleet of LNG-fuelled trucks in the UK.

Source:  LNG NEWS