News / Pioneering methanol retrofit adds new chapter to 'phoenix' Maersk Halifax

Maersk Halifax, the Maersk vessel rebuilt from the catastrophically fire-damaged Maersk Honam, has been extended to 15,690 teu and converted to a dual-fuel methanol-ready vessel at a Chinese shipyard.

In a departure from shipping’s general scrap-and-renew strategy, the ship has been fitted with new fuel tanks, allowing it to operate on methanol in dual-fuel configuration.

Because methanol has a lower energy density than conventional bunker fuels, larger tanks were needed. And the vessel has been extended by some 15 metres to accommodate this, also bringing an additional 690 teu of deck capacity, at the Zhoushan Xinya shipyard in an 88-day retrofit.

The move could point the way for further retrofits of Maersk vessels in service – an unusual strategy for a carrier that tends to value vessel uptime above all.

Leonardo Sonzio, Maersk’s head of fleet management and technology, indicated that Maersk was considering it, however. He said: “Since we set the ambitious climate goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2040, we have explored the potential in retrofitting vessels with dual-fuel engines.”

Should Maersk continue to retrofit its fleet for low- or zero-carbon fuels, this could not only drastically accelerate its schedule for decarbonisation, but also avoid so-called ‘embodied carbon’, the often-overlooked emissions cost of scrapping ships and building new ones – as green as they might eventually be.

“In the coming year, we will learn from this first conversion of a large vessel,” explained Mr Sonzio. “Retrofits of vessels can be an important alternative to newbuilds in our transition from fossil fuels to low-emission fuels.”

Delivered in 2017, Maersk Honam was virtually destroyed a year later in a cargo fire that started in a container of sodium dichloroisocyanurate dihydrate, a constituent of cleaning chemicals, in the forward cargo hold.

With its bow virtually destroyed, the vessel was rebuilt at Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries and relaunched as Maersk Halifax in 2019.

The fire claimed the lives of five seafarers and launched industry-wide upheaval over misdeclared cargo, a common practice in which containers of dangerous goods are declared to be something else, allowing the cargo owner to sidestep additional handling fees.

Highly flammable cargo is generally placed on the outside corners of container stacks, where they are adjacent to fewer other boxes and fires can be detected and fought more easily. Though subsequent investigation found the Honan container had not been misdeclared, it had been poorly placed, low down in the stack, so the fire spread to several neighbouring boxes before the crew were alerted to the blaze.