Shell Introduces Cardissa Floating Gas Station

Cardissa tanker vessel

In a global trend of the world’s 50,000 largest ships moving away from relatively dirty fuel oil towards LNG, Royal Dutch Shell has introduced the South-Korean built Cardissa, a vessel able to refuel ships at sea with LNG and as such provide more flexibility. The future of LNG in shipping looks bright since the global acceptance of the Paris Accords. Heavy fuel oil is one of the dirties fuels around, due to its sulfur content.

[businesskorea.co.kr] – LNG Emerging as Marine Fuel
[eniday.com] – LNG fuel and the shipping sector
[lngworldnews.com] – Shell’s first LNG bunkering vessel on way to Europe
[helderline.nl] – Cardissa
[marinetraffic.com] – Cardissa

Global LNG Trade 2016

Australia replaced Qatar as the largest exporter.

[iea.org] – Natural Gas 2017 – overview
[twitter.com] – Global LNG trade continued to increase in 2016, with Australia replacing Qatar as largest LNG supplier to OECD Asia

Shell Building Largest FLNG Tanker Ever (488m)

Royal Dutch Shell apparently is less impressed by predictions of rapidly depleting fossil fuel reserves, now that it is busy building the largest vessel in history (250,000 ton = 35 Eiffel towers) for the transport of floating liquefied natural gas, in South-Korea (by Samsung). Fully laden the weight of the giant (600,000 ton) would be five times that of an aircraft carrier and can be seen as the world’s largest fridge (-163°C). The fuel is intended to be pumped from the ocean floor near the Australian coast and can be received by anyone with enough cash and a large enough quay.

[wikipedia]
[lngworldnews.com]

Gazprom To Sell Israeli LNG

[source]
Source: Tamar natural gas field in the Mediterranean. Volume: 3 million tons/year of LNG. Size Tamar: at least 8 trillion feet3. Time span deal: 20 year. Start deliveries: April 2013. For Gazprom this means moving away from the traditional pipeline trade with European customers.

[upi.com]
[en.rian.ru]
[bloomberg.com]
[wikipedia.org] – Tamar gas field

Willem Barentsz Comes Full Circle

Dutch movie trailer with english subs of Willem Barentsz trying to find the northern sea route to east Asia in 1594. He failed but at least he had a sea named after him. More than four centuries later, the voyage is becoming routine. Now the first ever tanker loaded with liquid natural gas (LNG) sails the Northern Sea Route with gas from Norway to energy hungry Japan. Thanks to global warming causing rapid melting of sea ice.

[barentsobserver.com]