German LNG bunker barge draws interest

The barge is the brainchild of naval architect and industrial engineer Stephan Aumann. He is also the managing director of Hamburg’s Theodor Buschmann Shipyard which has developed the new barge and hopes to market it.

Mr Aumann says the barge is the first of its kind to be designed and built specifically for the German infrastructure. He told The Motorship initial interest had been “surprisingly high”. He mentioned initial talks with a major multi-purpose port operator in Hamburg and said one German port authority was also interested as was another port and lock operator.

Mr Aumann also spoke of possibilities for the barge abroad as a supplier for shore power during cruise ship port calls. He said TB-X was just the kind of solution required to close the gap in the LNG supply chain for ships”.

The TB-X barge has been under development at Buschmann for about a year with Marine Service GmbH as the turnkey partner for the vessel’s LNG system. Mr Aumann said the design, especially in the area of the manifold, was compatible with other concepts under study, such as that for an LNG terminal in Hamburg.

The Buschmann design is an LNG bunker barge with vacuum insulated C-type tanks and with an LNG capacity of 100m³ to 900m³. Mr. Aumann says as far as capacity is concerned “the sky is the limit and we will build whatever size the customer needs”.

Because the size of the LNG tank will determine the dimensions of the barge, he says it is difficult to fix exact dimensions at this stage. However Mr. Aumann told The Motorship the barge would probably be some 50m long and about 15m wide.

Also, although the first design is a push barge he says it will be “very easy” to adapt to individual customer requirements. He said it can be equipped with a self-propelled propulsion system or supplied as a jack-up or stationary port LNG fuel station.