Exmar joins ballast-free LNG carrier project

The B-FREE project – with partners including Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Corp (DSIC), membrane specialist GTT and Lloyd’s Register – has already developed a design concept that showed potentially lower construction and operational costs as well as increased efficiency from eliminating ballast water, and therefore the need for expensive regulatory compliance measures.

In the second stage, the partners will apply more detailed analysis and verification, including model testing, to verify the design advantages.

Pierre Dincq, managing director of shipping, Exmar said: “By eliminating the need for ballast water, there is an absolute certainty that no invasive species will be transported on board of the vessel. Moreover, the ballast water treatment plant can be omitted, reducing the maintenance requirements and the energy consumption of the vessel which has a positive impact on the CO2 footprint of the vessel.”

Ma Yingbin, deputy technical director, DSIC, said: “We have built experience on reduced ballast water oil tanker designs in the past and this will benefit the ballast-free, medium-sized LNG carrier development. DSIC will focus on ship arrangement, performance calculations including hull line optimization by CFD and ship model test verification, propulsion selection and hull structure basic design.”