On Thursday November 15th, the Greek Section of SNAME had their third meeting of the year at the prestigious MARAN Auditorium in the new Flag-ship building of John Angelicoussis Group of Companies kindly offered for the occasion. Speaker in the event was Antonis Trakakis, Technical Manager of Arista Shipping and a major technical driving force behind project FORWARD. The title of his presentation was:” LNG as Fuel; an answer or a question”. This ground- breaking presentation was attended by over 80 professionals and students.
In summary Mr. Trakakis outlined the following:
The strategy of IMO for the reduction of greenhouse gases from shipping and the very ambitious targets set at MEPC72, which ultimately drive shipping to decarbonization, mandate us to seek for alternative fuels.
In its fossil form, the application of LNG as marine fuel can easily meet the goals of the immediate future. Research from Project Forward, yielded that carbon neutral methane synthesized from CO2 captured at emission point, together with hydrogen produced from renewable energy, is a safe way to ultimately reach even the most ambitious targets. Carbon neutral methane has a net zero carbon footprint, achieving net zero carbon emissions by balancing a measured amount of carbon released with an equivalent amount sequestered or offset. Although not really available today, such fuel may be transported, stored and burnt in engines in the same manner like the fossil LNG, therefore without the need to modify or disrupt existing and fully developed supply chains. Although methane has a strong greenhouse potential, there are no metrics to describe accurately its long-term effect.
Today the engine technology has made significant advances and is capable to handle very easily the impact from the variation of Methane Number and yield a significant net reduction of GHG even if methane slip is included (with the assumptions included in the metrics), while new approaches in machinery arrangement allow serious other operational issues such as minimum propulsion load and transient response to be properly addressed when running on the low-pressure Otto cycle.
The effect from the cap on overall emissions from shipping, results in offset of cooling and warming effects from each individual pollutant, and the measures for pollution prevention are not expected to promote global warming.
Many interesting questions were posed at the seminar. The discussions continued in the after-the-meeting social time which was attended by almost the whole audience. The Greek Section of SNAME, Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, is striving for the proliferation of knowledge and expertise in the field of Shipping along with other societies and organizations. It is also striving to select the most appropriate topics in order to secure the participation of the broad public in our seminars.
The presentation can be found here