Cryo Shipping is set to place an order for a pair of LNG bunker vessels for its European operations.
Managing director and owner Nicholai Olsen said he is in talks to order two vessels of between 5,000 cbm and 6,000 cbm for delivery in 2023.
"We are about to conclude a deal," he said, but would not comment on pricing or reveal the yard.
The world fleet of such vessels still numbers only in the dozens, and Olsen has said the growth of his company's LNG bunkering supply business depends on the availability of tonnage.
VesselsValue numbers the fleet of LNG carriers under 30,000 cbm at 29 ships, plus 13 more for delivery this year.
Cryo announced that it had set an LNG bunkering record on 24 January using chartered tonnage to supply an Altera Infrastructure shuttle tanker. Olsen said the 103,500-dwt Altera Wave (built 2021) is "the largest LNG-powered merchant ship to be supplied with LNG from a bunker vessel in Asia and Oceania".
About 1,800 cbm of LNG fuel from Malaysian state-owned energy major Petronas was delivered by the 7,500-cbm LNG bunkering vessel Avenir Advantage (built 2020) in Malaysian waters of the Singapore Strait.
Cryo also uses spotted-in tonnage for similar vessel-supplied LNG bunkering business in northern Europe, in addition to its truck-to-ship deliveries in its biggest markets, Copenhagen-Malmo and Klaipeda.
But volume growth is key to his company's profitability, according to Olsen, so Cryo is in talks to charter in small LNG carriers at least until delivery of the intended newbuilding order.
"In Europe we are now looking at taking small bunkering vessels on a short period basis," he said. The basis for such operations would be contract of affreightment business that Cryo would perform in a range from Zeebrugge and Rotterdam to the Norwegian coast.
Promising business
In February, Olsen expects two more jobs on the scale of the bunkering of Altera Wave, one in Asia and one in Europe.
"For the larger bunkering jobs, we need volume. Our budget is to average one job a month in the first six months of this year and scale up in the second half," he said. "It is a promising business as long as we can enlarge — and there need to be more vessels available to do that."
The LNG bunkering newbuildings are not the company's first effort at new tonnage.
In 2019, soon after starting in business delivering LNG by truck, Cryo Shipping was already looking at plans to build a hydrogen bunkering vessel, and won Norwegian government financial support to research a design to serve the domestic coastal market.
At the time, former partner Are Magnussen told TradeWinds he believed a Moss Maritime 9,000-cbm design for a hydrogen bunkering vessel was "far too large to be economically viable in the foreseeable future" and that the company was looking to develop "a much smaller vessel suitable for coastal and port operations".
Olsen is sole owner of Cryo Shipping after buying out Magnussen last year. The two former Kristian Gerhard Jebsen executives set up Cryo in Bergen in 2019.
An update on the status of the company's hydrogen bunkering plans was not immediately available.
