It has launched BW Pavilion LNG with Pavilion Energy, which is a unit of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings.
The Andreas Sohmen-Pao-led shipowner said the joint venture would “acquire, manage and charter” maritime LNG assets, including LNG carriers.
BW Group said the joint venture assets will initially be established with one existing and two new LNG carriers.
The fleet will include the 138,000-cbm BW GDF Suez Everett (built 2003) and BW's two 162,000-cbm newbuildings at Hyundai Heavy Industries which are due for delivery in 2015.
Pavilion Energy was formed just over a year ago to focus on investments in LNG trading and exploration, storage, processing and shipping.
Seah Moon Ming, group chief executive of Pavilion Energy, said: “The partnership with BW Group represents our expansion into LNG shipping.”
He added that it was an investment into a critical part of the LNG value chain which enables Pavilion to connect global LNG supplies to regional gas demand centres in Asia.
BW Group has a fleet of fourteen LNG carriers on the water. It also has two LNG carrier newbuildings on order at Hyundai and two LNG floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) units at Samsung.
On Monday BW Group unveiled that it had formed a tanker joint venture with private equity outfit Pacific Alliance Group (PAG).
The two companies said the aim of the tie-up, to be called BW Pacific, was to target consolidation in the product tanker market.
Their first move has been to acquire ten modern MR product tankers from Vitol Energy subsidiary Elandra Pte Ltd.
On Tuesday it followed that up with a deal to acquire ten 19,900-dwt chemical carriers from Stream Tankers, a joint venture between Utkilen and EDG Holding.
The deal comprised two existing vessels plus eight newbuildings to be delivered between 2015 and 2018 from Japan’s Shitanoe Shipbuilding and Fukuoka Shipbuilding.
