At Solar Solve, one of the tools we use to keep up to date with what is happening in the worldwide marine industry is BRL FOCUS. It is a very informative and extremely useful weekly newsletter, compiled by Barry Luthwaite and his team at BRL.
We learn all sorts of interesting news from Barry; some good and some not so good, as you would expect as time marches on, year after year and decade after decade.
This week the very good news is that gas, LPG and LNG are still dominant features, with the recent increased movement of LPG business continuing. A newly formed joint venture company has just ordered three, plus an option on a further two, 86,000 cubic metre capacity LPG carriers, putting them amongst the world’s largest vessels of this type. The successful builder is China’s Jiangnan Shipyard, who will deliver the ships at 6-month intervals from July 2022.
LNG also continues to stack up significant business. Four more orders took the orders backlog to a staggering 171 units and in addition, there are berth reservations from Qatar for 135 Very Large Gas Carriers, allocated to the big 3 Korean shipbuilders, Hyundai, Daewoo and Samsung, stretching into 2027. Hyundai has also secured orders for four 174,000 cubic metre capacity LNG carriers set for delivery in 2023. I find all of this somewhat mind boggling.
Another snippet of interesting information this week is Barry’s comment that Offshore is beginning to stir a bit, for modern support vessels. Also notable is the interest in FPSO’s for both newbuildings, or conversions of existing tankers.
There is obviously a huge amount of confidence displayed by shipowners, that things will get better and life will go on. This good news makes very welcome reading at this time.
My thanks to Barry Luthwaite and BRL who hold the copyright on the information in this week’s blog.
John Heron Lightfoot MBE, Solar Solve Chairman
