Gas transport gets new tanker edge

Workers at an LNG facility of CIMC Enric Holding Ltd in Nantong, Jiangsu province. [Photo by Wang Junrong/For China Daily]

China's hunger for natural gas has pushed CIMC Enric Holding Ltd, one of the country's biggest liquefied natural gas equipment manufacturers by sales revenue, to upgrade its products.

Its newly designed high-performance, large-capacity LNG tankers are expected to redefine ocean transport of natural gas.

"Once this mode of transportation is launched and widely accepted, a lot of wasted offshore natural gas will be saved," said Yang Baoying, deputy general manager at CIMC Enric.

The new 40-foot (12.2 meter) containers passed security tests in the United States recently. Each of them can enable LNG imports in small batches, and successfully implement the LNG one-tank multimodal transport on road, rail and water. They can also upgrade LNG logistics in the global market.

CIMC Enric also completed a sea trail of a 14,000 cubic meters LNG carrier in November 2016. This is one of the 20 LNG feeder vessels available in the world.

The added value and technical content of LNG carriers are advanced than those of oil tankers, and they will be equipped with tanks that can resist extremely low temperatures.

The company produced the world's first CNG transport ship that can move 700,000 cubic meters of CNG for its client in Tantong, Jiangsu province, in early 2016.

Even though demand for LNG is depressed and under pressure, thrust on low carbon energy use will see LNG playing a key role in the optimization of the domestic energy structure, said Sun Hongli, another deputy general manager of CIMC Enric, a subsidiary of China International Marine Containers (Group) Ltd.

Bao Zhangjing, director of the China Shipbuilding Industry Research Center, said: "At present, most of the associated gas gained from offshore drilling projects is commonly burned as waste gas, including in China and other countries."

The company's product range includes storage tanks, LNG carriers, import terminals and export terminals. CIMC Enric specializes in the manufacture of equipment for energy, chemical and liquid food industries.

Its equipment and engineering business covers both onshore compressed natural gas or CNG industrial chain and offshore LNG industrial chain.

CIMC Enric's existing products range from upstream LNG liquefaction plants, through varieties of key storage equipment and engineering services in the midstream (such as LNG import and export terminals, small and medium-sized LNG and CNG carriers, and LNG tanks for land-ship-railway multimodal transportation), to gasification stations, gas refueling stations and LNG fuel systems for vehicles and ships in the downstream.