• 29 Nov 2016

Viking Line has announced that it has signed a letter of intent (LOI) with China’s Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry Co. Ltd regarding an order for an LNG-fuelled passenger vessel to be delivered in Spring 2020. The total investment is said to be approximately €190 million.

The vessel is intended to be a collaborative project, and the plan is to engage a number of Finnish and other European suppliers, including Deltamarin, Wärtsilä and ABB Marine as well as a number of others;  Viking Line claims that it is planning to sign a final agreement during Spring 2017, and that the LOI includes an option for an additional vessel.

Viking Line plans to use the vessel to serve the route from Turku (Finland), to the Åland Islands (Finland), to Stockholm (Sweden). The vessel will be 218 metres in length and have a gross registered tonnage of 63,000 tonnes. Passenger capacity will be 2,800 people, and the length of its cargo lanes will be 1,500 metres.

Jans Hanses, the CEO of the company, said: “Our intention is for the vessel to run on LNG. We have excellent experience with this from the M/S Viking Grace, the first large LNG-powered passenger vessel in the world. Great emphasis has been placed in the planning work on environmentally sound solutions, including new innovative energy-efficient applications. Many years of planning work have gone into this newbuilding project in conjunction with the European Union’s Motorways of the Seas project under the scope of the Connecting Europe Facility funding instrument, which has also included the Port of Turku and the Ports of Stockholm.”