Marflet Marine, a Spanish private shipping company, has announced a new step in its decarbonisation strategy by signing a contract with bound4blue to install four 22m-high eSAILs on its oil and chemical tanker Santiago I. Scheduled for mid-2025, the installation will make Marflet the first Spanish shipowner to integrate wind-assisted propulsion (WAP) in its merchant […]
Kongsberg Maritime to provide design, engineering and equipment on two methanol-ready chemical tankers for Swedish shipping firm In 2010, Sirius Shipping’s chemical tanker Olympus became the first in the world to reduce its NOx emissions by 90% through retrofitting. Today, the vessel sails with pioneering equipment that controls emissions on all engines and saves […]
Stolt Tankers’ Stolt Lotus has become the first vessel in the world to be coated using Canadian firm Graphite Innovation & Technologies’ (GIT) X-GIT FUEL graphene-based hull coating solution, which is believed to offer significant reductions in fuel consumption. The 30,000-deadweight vessel spent five days drydocked in China where the sustainable hull coating was applied. Reckoned […]
Dry weather and low water levels on the River Rhine in Germany this year have again hindered inland shipping. Operations were disrupted on the waterway for several weeks over the summer and, after a brief recovery in September, the river’s water levels fell once more in October, preventing vessels from sailing fully loaded. This latest […]
All the signs are that 2023 will be one of the best years for some time for Portuguese shiprepair yard Lisnave. Over the first nine months the company docked 55 vessels of varying types. This is not an exceptionally high figure. However, the average value of the work per vessel contracted by owners was significantly […]
Baltic Workboats and BLRT Grupp subsidiary Western Baltija Shipbuilding are to develop an all-electric waste collection tanker for the Port of Klaipeda in Lithuania. The contract, valued at nearly US$12 million, will see the creation of a 42m x 10m tanker with the capacity to carry up to 400m3 of liquid waste and rainwater collected […]
The salvage of the stricken oil tanker FSO Safer reached another milestone recently as the transfer of oil from the vessel finally got underway. The floating storage and offloading unit (FSO) is located 4.8 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen. The vessel has been increasingly deteriorating since it was abandoned in 2015. Dutch salvage […]
Now under new ownership, the Gibraltar shipyard finds itself in a good place, as favourable market conditions generate increased volumes of business. Last year marked the start of a new era for Gibdock as it was taken over by the UK-based The Balaena Group in May 2022. Since then, the yard has gone from strength […]
The Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) has announced that it has begun to roll out its new digital tanker inspection programme, SIRE 2.0. The upgrade will replace the existing software used to assess a vessel’s condition and operational standards. SIRE 2.0 is being introduced in four phases. Phase 1, the initial testing stage, is […]
Concordia Damen’s optimised hull design ready for low water levels Transport along Europe’s inland waterways is vital to trade, with the river Rhine one of the continent’s busiest waterways. Part of the Rhine-Alpine corridor, the 1,232km-long river runs from the Swiss Alps through Liechtenstein, Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands. In recent years the Rhine […]
By Jose Gonzalez and Guntars Zommers Stolt Tankers, The Netherlands Biofouling is a major contributor to energy efficiency reduction; the ships spend almost their entire operational life afloat favoring the creation of biological layers (biofilm) and macrofouling populations in different working areas of the ship. The consequence of this occurrence is mainly reflected in additional […]
Modern wind-assist systems are a major departure from traditional sail systems in that they are not made of canvas and while there may be some systems that can alter their shape, most are made of rigid materials and have automated control systems. Flettner rotors have been the most popular choice of system so far accounting […]