Industrial-scale carbon-curbing ambitions are presenting vessel innovation and newbuild enterprises with what has been described as the biggest mercantile challenge ever – designing a ship that can transport liquid nitrogen at minus 253 degrees Celsius.
At only 20 degrees above absolute zero, the lowest thermodynamic limit, it would be reasonable to think that it’s impossible to carry cargo so cold it could cause a ship’s structure to crack.
Think again.
From Canada to Norway, South Korea and Japan, efforts are under way to accomplish the conceivably impossible.
To put matters into perspective – it would require shipping nitrogen at almost 100Cs colder than what is needed to carry liquid natural gas at sea (LNG).
Getting to where we currently are with shipping LNG was an engineering challenge that took 60 years to master.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) in Tokyo believes it already has the ideal solution, with a 116-metre-long 8 000-gross-tonnage vessel currently undergoing sea trials.
The vessel is fitted with a 1 250-cubic-metre, double-insulated and vacuum-sealed tank to hold the hydrogen at the required temperatures - and KHI said it was ready to embark on a maiden demonstration voyage from Japan to Australia in the coming months.
The 9 000-kilometre voyage will be diesel-driven, but KHI intends to draw from the gas its vessels will carry, hydrogen, to eventually power much bigger commercial vessels than its prototype.
Vice executive officer Motohiko Nishimura said that the company was already in the process of scaling the initial vessel design to commercial levels, a process that will hopefully be complete by around 2025, with a view to going commercial by 2030.
In Ulsan, also known as Hyundai City, the world’s biggest vessel construction company, Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, has an approach to the extreme cold transportation problem of hydrogen that’s similar to KHI further east.
Using specially developed super-strength steel, fused together with the latest welding technology, the shipbuilder believes its insulation methods will withstand the risk of tanks cracking.
Compared to its Far East rivals, Wilhelmsen Group in Tønsberg has a more ‘automotive’ approach, looking at using roll-on roll-off (roro) vessels to ship specially made containers between hubs along Norway’s west coast from where the gas will be fed into the various industrial points of use.
Perhaps the most lateral-thinking solution to the hydrogen transportation quandary can be found in Burnaby where Canadian engineers from Ballard Power Systems are working with Australian partners from Global Energy Ventures to develop a vessel that could carry compressed hydrogen in gas form.
According to Ballard vice president Nicolas Pocarc, this method rules out the extreme temperature scenario.
That’s the upshot.
On the downside such a vessel will not be able to carry as much hydrogen as a vessel capable of carrying the gas in liquefied form.
While all the methods look good on paper, there is, as always, a bottom-line dilemma.
At an estimated $50-$240 million per vessel, carrying bulk hydrogen at sea could quite simply be cost prohibitive, according to Carlo Raucci, a marine decarbonisation consultant with ship certifier LR.
"The cost of a vessel transporting hydrogen will mainly be driven by the cost of the storage system. Storing liquid hydrogen could be very expensive because of its complexity," he told Reuters.