A purple-hulled vessel, sporting a rotor sail, has been criss-crossing the Yellow Sea in recent weeks carrying out landmark sea trials.
The Northern Pioneer is the first is a series of four 7,500 cu m liquefied carbon dioxide (LCO2) carriers ordered at Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co (DSIC) by Northern Lights, a joint venture between Shell, TotalEnergies and Equinor which plans to transport and sequester CO2 in the North Sea.
Northern Lights is the first project in the world allowing industrial companies to transport and sequester their CO2 emissions.
Operational since September, the phase one installations can store up to 1.5m tons of CO2 per year.
In the Northern Lights CCS project LCO2 is delivered to a receiving terminal on Norway’s west coast. It will be stored there and piped to an aquifer 2.6 km below the seabed of the North Sea.
TotalEnergies is aiming to develop a CO2 storage capacity (CCS) of more than 10m tons by 2030, with many other energy majors making similar forecasts leading many yards in Asia to market their own LCO2 carrier designs.
According to the Global CCS Institute, there are 41 CCS facilities in operation globally today at sites including gas power plants and chemical refineries manufacturing products such as ethanol and ammonia. And there are more than 350 new CCS facilities under development across the world, many of which are due to come online over the next few years.
Shipping already already has a wide body of knowledge in cryogenics and the sea transport of gases in liquid form.
LNG, for example, is shipped by sea at -162°C. LPG carriers, on the other hand, use a combination of pressure and temperatures to carry cargoes typically at about -45°C to -30°C. A similar arrangement would be required to ship carbon dioxide at scale, with gas carriers transporting carbon dioxide at slightly elevated pressure but similarly low temperature, to keep it in liquid form and prevent it converting from a gas into a solid as it expands – dry ice.
According to a report from Rystad Energy last year, there will need to be 55 LCO2 carriers by 2030.
Rystad Energy predicted that, based on planned carbon capture projects, more than 90 m tons per annum of CO2 will be shipped by the end of the decade, volumes requiring 48 terminals to handle the import and export of the gas.
Clarksons green transition group senior technical advisor, Johan Tutturen told a CO2 shipping conference held in Houston in September that potential demand for similar sized 7,500 cu m LCO2 carriers could approach 2,500 ships by 2050, albeit that in the years ahead, like in the evolution of all gas carriers, capacities will increase a great deal requiring less hulls.
Erik Mathias Sørhaug, business development director for CO2 shipping at class society DNV, told Splash: “If Europe is to reach its targets for CCS by 2030 a lot needs to happen within the next couple of years, including ordering a large number of ships tailored for transportation of CO2.”
DNV also sees many projects advancing in Asia where shipping will need to play an essential part of the infrastructure transporting large volumes of CO2 over longer distances than is typically seen in Europe, which will require larger ships.
In DNV’s 2024 Energy Transition Outlook, the class society predicted about 600m tons of CO2 a year could be captured by 2040, a figure rising to 1.4bn tons by 2050.
“If we are to reach the goals in the Paris Agreement, much higher volumes will need to be captured and stored,” Sørhaug said.
These volumes will need to be transported by pipelines, ships, trucks, trains or a combination of all.
“For shipping and the maritime industry this will be a major opportunity as it will require a new large fleet of ships, offshore units and floating terminals,” Sørhaug concluded.
