News / Out-of-fashion LNG now the favourite fuel for new containerships

LNG appeared briefly to go out of fashion last year after being slammed as a ‘bridge to nowhere’ and a fossil fuel industry ‘con’.

However, LNG-fuelled containerships have swept back to prominence in newbuild ordering, with a share of some 55% of the 2024 orderbook.

A record 1.76m teu of LNG-powered tonnage has been ordered, says Alphaliner this week, up from 440,000 teu in 2023.

It also represents a major increase over the 1.16m teu of LNG-powered tonnage ordered in 2022 – before the souring of sentiment and corresponding hype of methanol.

Meanwhile, despite pledges from a number of shipping companies this year, methanol ordering appears to have returned to a level similar to that of 2022, with 650,000 teu this yea – 21% of total vessel orders – compared with 920,000 teu in 2023 and 550,000 teu in 2022.

Maersk opted to pioneer methanol throughout 2023, but made a well-publicised u-turn in favour of LNG recently, ordering 10 LNG-powered 16,800 teu vessels. And Alphaliner claims the line has also ordered six more 16,000 teu LNG vessels from Hanwha, and will “quite likely” charter 10 LNG-powered 16,000 teu Seaspan vessels ordered at YZJ.

“We said from the beginning, when we placed these [methanol] orders, that we will not be able to use green fuels to begin with, and therefore this vessel and some of its systems will also use conventional fuels,” Maersk CCO Karsten Kildahl admitted to journalists at a ship-naming last week, explaining that supplies of green methanol were not available to the extent hoped.

Last year, Opportunity Green CEO Aoife O’Leary told The Loadstar that LNG, as a fossil fuel, was “a greenwashing con”, and that shipowners were being disingenuous in promoting the fuel as ‘green’.

“It blows my mind… that part of the industry has managed to delude itself that you can decarbonise by moving from fossil oil to fossil gas,” she said. “The science is very clear now… very intelligent people work in shipping. If you want to meet your sulphur targets [using LNG] I can understand that – just don’t tell me you’re doing it for the climate.”

But LNG’s proponents argue that, despite being a fossil fuel, it is a pathway to greener fuels such as bio-LNG, which can be produced using biogenic emissions of methane – those released as part of natural processes. Fossil LNG, bio-LNG, and even synthetic LNG share the same chemical composition, allowing any to substituted in a ship without requiring new components to be fitted.

But part of the pushback against LNG in recent years related to concerns over ‘methane slip’. Using methane for ship fuel entails a reduction in CO₂ emissions of around 20%, but incomplete combustion from ship engines leads to emissions of unburned methane from the funnel. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this means emitting a gas 29.8 times as aggressive in its heat-trapping capability, or global warming potential, than CO₂.

Methane slip is extremely low in modern low-speed two-stroke engines – the main engines used to power containerships and car carriers. Typical of today’s market, MAN promises less than 0.2g/kWh brake power for its ME-GI ‘Gas Injection’ series.

But according to a Sphera study, commissioned by LNG lobby Sea-LNG, in typical Otto-cycle engines, which encompass those used for auxiliary power on vessels, methane slip is still a concern, amounting to 2.14g/kWh brake power. This can be reduced to 1.07g/kWh with the latest engine technologies, manufacturers claim.

Ship exhaust is not the only source of methane, however, with some often released during bunkering operations, and a well-documented profusion of leaks from gas infrastructure likely to increase as more is built for bunkering ships.