New LNG Ship Design Said to Provide 3-5% Fuel Savings

BG Group is said to have tested a scale model of the hull design and discussed the vessel design with shipyards.

BG Group says it has been developing the liquefied natural gas (LNG) "ship of the future" which enables a 3 to 5 percent savings in fuel consumption and corresponding emissions.

The company says the goal of the project, which is called Blue Amazon after a region off the coast of Brazil in which BG Group developed the concept, is to improve the efficiency and layout of the best LNG vessel designs currently being built.

"Our task was to try and independently create a new, highly efficient hull form and general arrangement for an LNG ship," said Michael Davison, a Project Development Manager at BG Group.

After designing a low-resistance hull form, the project team is said to have built a scale model and tested it at facilities at Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas in São Paulo, modelling three sailing speeds, two LNG loading conditions, as well as various wave conditions.

BG Group says that the project group did not follow the industry-standard shape or arrangement when designing the ship's LNG cargo tanks.

"Three to five percent savings may not sound much, but if you've got a large fleet of say 30, 40 ships, each burning around 80 tonnes of fuel a day, you can imagine the emissions and commercial advantage of such savings," said Davison.

"Over a year, a fleet of such ships would be saving approximately 32,000 tonnes of LNG fuel."

BG Group says it recently discussed the design with Korean shipyards in order to receive their feedback. 

"The project teams – considering they're not ship builders – have created a good design to start challenging the yards," said Davison.

With the final design expected by March 2016, the team is said to be currently refining the design in order to move into the final stage of optimisation.

Brazil's BG Technology Group is said to have facilitated the project, which was carried out with assistance from the Classification Society Bureau Veritas (BV), BV's technology partner HydrOcean, GTT, and the Instituto de Pesquisas Tecnológicas, and the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

In April, Ship & Bunker reported that Royal Dutch Shell plc (Shell) agreed to acquire BG Group, with observers pointing to BG Group's LNG assets as a key reason for the deal.