India Moves Toward Natural Gas Bunkers for Naval Ships

India is working toward the use of natural gas bunkers in newbuild naval ships.
File Image / Pixabay

Goa Shipyard Limited (GSL), the Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI), and India's Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas are working together to progress a proposal to use natural gas as fuel for next generation naval warships, Indian media reports.

The project is set to be initiated as a pilot study under an agreement with the key stakeholders.

"I have suggested to Goa Shipyard and the Indian Coast Guard, and maybe GAIL will partner with these two agencies. We want to have a pilot study to see whether we can use LNG (liquefied natural gas) or CNG (compressed natural gas) as a fuel, which is cheaper and cleaner for marine shipping," said Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas.

"The Indian marine sector usually uses high speed diesel. Gradually, new fuels like CNG and LNG are coming in. We will soon have a technical memorandum of understanding with these three organisations."

Pradhan says he wants to use Gas India Limited's (GAIL's) 175 km-long CNG pipeline, which ends at Vasco, to bunker warships that GSL is set to build for the Indian navy and coast guard.

"We can see how we can create engineering capability, because the Coast Guard needs both, high speed and slow (speed) ships for surveillance. We have to work out how can we do this with gas fuel. We want to start that project in Goa Shipyard limited," said Pradhan.

Earlier this month, Ship & Bunker reported that the Indian government is also mulling a proposal to allow the use of methanol as marine fuel in the country.