DNV GL

The biennial SMM event in Hamburg featured a number of ammonia announcements from across the entire fuel value chain, including deployment timelines for MAN’s two-stroke engines, high-pressure fuel pumps, bunker and container ship designs, and technology integration partnerships.

Clarksons Research and DNV have provided their analysis of global ship orders for 2023. Last year saw the first orders for ammonia-fueled vessels, with container ships & car carriers dominating the order book for alternative fuel propulsion ships. But UMAS & the Global Maritime Forum warn that the current order book trajectory may only be a fifth of what is needed to achieve the IMO’s 2030 target for alternative fuel uptake.

The CAMPFIRE consortium is exploring the feasibility of ammonia-powered cruise liners on the Baltic Sea. Project partners Rostock Port, Yara, DNV and Carnival Maritime discussed progress to date at a recent Maritime Ammonia Insights webinar, including promising logistics, infrastructure & safety findings.

Amon Maritime has launched a new subsidiary - Amon Offshore - which will build, own and operate a fleet of ammonia-powered platform supply vessels, to operate off Norway’s coast. The new PSV design has already received AiP for ammonia notation from DNV, and preliminary flag approval from Norwegian Maritime Authorities. We also explore two more AiP for ammonia-powered vessels in China: a 16,000 TEU container ship and a 50,000 tonne, mid-range oil/chemical tanker.

H2 Carrier's P2XFloater™ concept received Approval in Principle from DNV in late August. With beginnings in the oil industry, Floating Production units have played a vital role, extending the life of offshore fields and allowing for greater flexibility in production & transfer of product. As the energy transition gathers pace, so-called “Floaters” represent an immediate opportunity to fully leverage new Power-to-X projects, allowing for offshore production of hydrogen and ammonia.

Two recent reports (one from Bureau Veritas & Total, the other from the Together in Safety consortium) illustrate just how seriously the maritime industry is pursuing low carbon ammonia fuel. While progress in the maritime ammonia space is impressive, safety risks are widely-acknowledged and work remains to be done.

Both reports identify key hazards facing adoption of ammonia as a maritime fuel, and echo points heard before in the development of methanol & LNG as maritime fuels: high-risk hazards currently exist that must be eliminated, mitigated or controlled. But Together in Safety concludes the way forward will be via collaboration & shared responsibility - something we’re already seeing in the multiple high-profile safety studies and consortia working around the globe. Thankfully, the willingness of significant maritime players to engage on ammonia and the momentum for change are both high.

InterContinental Energy, OQ and Enertech announced a number of key development updates last week for their 25 GW Green Energy Oman (“GEO”) project. Three specialist organisations have been contracted to perform feasibility, engineering & impact assessment work, and new details were announced about the project’s location, including a potential site for ammonia production on the Oman coast.

In Singapore, the Global Centre for Maritime Decarbanisation has selected a DNV-led consortium to carry out a key bunkering safety study. The work of DNV, Surbana Jurong and the Singapore Maritime Academy will create a "regulatory sandbox" to enable the demonstration of ammonia bunkering at two trial locations, and run for twelve months until February 2022.

As part of its efforts to support the adoption of ammonia as an alternative maritime fuel, the American Bureau of Shipping has published a new, comprehensive guide to ammonia-fueled vessels. ABS joins DNV GL, the Korean Register, RINA and Bureau Veritas in publishing ammonia-ready notations, fuel guidelines & vessel guides this year.

Infrastructure is key to realising the full potential of ammonia energy, enabling new markets and expanding the existing ones. By 2050 the hydrogen (and by extension, ammonia) market could be 20 times larger than it is today. What future possibilities are there to expand global ammonia production (currently 180 million tonnes per year) or trade volumes across the world’s oceans (currently 18 million tonnes per year)? On November 18, 2020, the Ammonia Energy Association (AEA) hosted a panel discussion moderated by Daniel Morris from KBR, as well as panel members Anthony Teo from DNV GL, Oliver Hatfield from Argus Media, and Michael Goff from Black & Veatch as part of the recent Ammonia Energy Conference. The panel’s insights from a number of different perspectives - market analytics, ship building and operating, as well as pipeline engineering - demonstrated ammonia's potential to become a low- or zero-carbon fuel of choice for the future. Current infrastructure can be adapted, new infrastructure can be built and operated cheaply, and lessons from previous fuel transitions can be taken on board to make the uptake of ammonia energy as smooth as possible.

This week, DNV GL published its annual Maritime Forecast to 2050, concluding that “e-ammonia, blue ammonia and bio-methanol are the most promising carbon-neutral fuels in the long run.” DNV GL’s assumptions that determine this long run, however, suggest a significant mid-term reliance on fossil LNG. This risks locking the industry into a long-term emissions trajectory incompatible with the IMO’s 2050 GHG targets, in part because of significant fuel supply and infrastructure investments. These investments could become more ‘sticky’ than expected. A host of alternative opinions have been published in the days before and after DNV GL published its report. These suggest that, for ammonia, the long run could begin this decade. Among others, MAN ES has announced that its ammonia engine will be available for retrofits by 2025.

DNV GL published its annual Energy Transition Outlook last week, which includes a dedicated analysis of the shipping industry in its Maritime Forecast to 2050. According to DNV GL, the IMO's 2050 emission reduction targets can be met through innovative ship design, using ammonia as an alternative fuel. Widespread commercial adoption of ammonia fuel would begin in 2037; ammonia would the dominant fuel choice for new builds by 2042; and ammonia would represent 25% of the maritime fuel mix by 2050. This represents new demand for roughly 120 million tons per year of green ammonia by 2050. This outcome greatly depends on how maritime regulations are developed in the coming years, but it would see ammonia-fueled ships represent almost 100% of new vessels (by fuel consumption) from 2044 onwards.

This week, DNV GL published its annual Energy Transition Outlook, providing a long-term forecast for global energy production and consumption, and including a dedicated report describing its Maritime Forecast to 2050. This is the first forecast from a major classification society explicitly to evaluate ammonia as a maritime fuel. By 2050, DNV GL predicts that 39% of the global shipping energy mix will consist of "carbon-neutral fuels," a category that include ammonia, hydrogen, biofuels, and other fuels produced from electricity. By 2050, these fuels will therefore have gained greater market share than oil, LNG, and battery-electric. If ammonia succeeds as the carbon-neutral fuel of choice in the shipping sector, this new demand will be roughly equivalent to 200 million tons of ammonia per year, more than today's total global production.