World?s first CNG ship to get first steel cut January

By Rikordias D. Siahaan

The world?s first CNG ship, designed to transport CNG from Gresik in East Java to Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia, is scheduled to get its first steel cut in January 2015.

?The ship will get its first steel cut in January and hopefully everything runs well,? said Suriyanto, President Director of PT Enviromate Technology International (ETI) to Petromindo recently.

ETI, together with Chinese firms Shijiazhuang Enric Gas Equipment Co.Ltd (SEGE) and Ocean Engineering Design & Research Institute of CIMC (CIMC), will build all of the infrastructures needed from Gresik to Lombok. ETI will be responsible to build the compression-decompression facilities at Gresik and Lombok, while SEGE and CIMC will team up to build the ship.

The ship will be built in Qingdao Wuchuan Heavy Industry in China, capable to transport 20 million standard cubic feet (mmcsf) of gas.

The companies signed a contract with PLN on April 5, 2014. PLN said the 5 million cubic feet per day (mmscfd ) of CNG will be used as a source of gas supply for peaking gas plant, which operates 4-5 hours per day during the peak load, which is able to generate up to 90 MW of electrical power for the Lombok island. The CNG Marine technology will then be applied to sites of other gas plants with the same or bigger capacities.

According to PLN, the contract value of the engineering-procurement-construction-installation is US$132 million plus Rp 126 billion. While the operation contract value and maintenance contract value is $4.50 million and Rp 45.40 billion respectively.

Editing by Reiner Simanjuntak