Wärtsilä to retrofit German ferry with LNG dual-fuel engines to reduce environmental footprint on sensitive sea area
18 July 2013
Wärtsilä has been awarded a retrofitting contract by the German shipyard BVT Brenn - und Verformtechnik Bremen GmbH. The project entails converting the m/v Ostfriesland, a car and passenger ferry owned by AG EMS, to be able to utilize liquefied natural gas (LNG) as fuel.
The vessel sails between Emden and Borkum Island on the Lower Saxon Wadden Sea National Park, an ecologically sensitive UNESCO World Heritage listed area in the southeastern part of the North Sea, and the retrofit will reduce the ship’s environmental impact.
The vessel will be fitted with two 6-cylinder Wärtsilä 20DF dual-fuel generating sets and a Wärtsilä LNGPac. The dual-fuel engines will run primarily on LNG as the main fuel, but have the capacity to switch to conventional liquid fuels if necessary.
The Wärtsilä gensets comprise generator and diesel engine mounted on a common baseframe. The 20 DF gensets have cylinder output of 146 kW/cylinder (50 Hz) or 176 kW/cylinder (60 Hz).
LNGPac. Click to enlarge. Wärtsilä LNGPac is a complete system that includes the bunkering station, LNG tank and tank room compartment, process skid, glycol-water heating unit, and the control and monitoring system.
Bunkering takes place from the bunkering station to the LNG tank via an insulated pipe. The LNG tank connection space compartment is mounted directly on the LNG tank. The tank connection space contains all the piping penetrations through the tank shell, as well as all heating media connections to the LNG evaporators.
The process inside the tank connection space includes all the connections and valves between the tank and the Pressure Build-up Evaporator (PBE), and between the tank and the Main Gas Evaporator (MGE), together with the evaporators themselves. The evaporators are heated by glycol-water that is circulated within a glycol-water heating unit.
Wärtsilä is proposing as a standard a proven design with no rotating machine with a pressurized vacuum insulated tank type C.
The scope of supply also includes Wärtsilä’s patented Cold Recovery System, which utilizes the latent heat of LNG in air conditioning systems, thus reducing the amount of electricity consumed in cooling compressors. Significant operational savings and an increase in overall vessel efficiency are the result.
The Wärtsilä contract was signed in April 2013. The retrofitting will be carried out during the second quarter of 2014 and is expected to be completed in about seven weeks.
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