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Transport of the new test engine on it way last year to MAN E&S Research Centre in Copenhagen. Photo by MAN Energy Solutions.
The outcome was for all three hazard scenarios that there was nothing safety-wise that was a bottleneck for making such systems. Our final design of the fuel gas supply system will be presented at the end of June this year, and we have also built that up in our test facility for testing.” What type of engine will dominate the industry in the next couple of decades? Our interviewee agrees with industry predictions that in the first decade of the shipping’s transition toward a greener future, we will see more engines operating on methane and LNG. It is the most obvious solution, commercially available on the market. Yet, there are two sides of the coin when talking about LNG. Namely, even though it is being touted as the best available solution, there are numerous questions about LNG’s real carbon footprint well to wake. Same page “The IMO still faces difficulties in defining this issue and is yet to bring some clarity, so everyone is on the same page. The trend we see right now is that most owners are going
for LNG, definitely. We have over 240 engines running on LNG ordered so far, in different sizes. Even though we have a methanol engine we don’t have a methanol engine of 60, 70 or 80 bore size yet in our programme. These are yet to be designed, and based on the overall request coming from the market. As technology providers, we have to listen to the market and adjust our development priorities accordingly when a business case matures and can cover the development overhead. If you look at our engine portfolio, it is enormous and there is so much overlap because you have different engines for different applications in the marine business,” Aabo said. The trend so far has been to introduce alternative fuels on ships transporting those fuels as cargo, so methanol engines on methanol carriers, and the case has been similar for LPG and ethane carriers. However, with the announcement from companies like A.P. Moller Mærsk on choosing methanol burning engines for one + one 2,200 TEU
containership newbuilds this trend is starting to change, Aabo noted, adding that these different types of fuels are going to be utilized in other applications. MAN Energy Solutions has been the maritime industry’s trailblazer when it comes to the production of dual-fuel engines, primarily focusing on LNG and LPG engines. Nevertheless, the company is keeping a close eye on the growing interest in using methanol as fuel. “LPG has really taken the market by storm and we have now 79 engines sold. It is our last diesel cycle dual-fuel engine that we marketed in late 2019. In the last six months or so, all engines sold to LPG carriers were our engines, so you could say that we hold 100% market share for this segment thanks to this engine,” Aabo said. Efficiency Offshore Energy wanted to know whether there was still room for improvement of the dual-fuel engines running on the different dual fuels.
