Singapore-based Eastern Pacific Shipping (EPS) has announced the naming of three of its new LNG dual-fuel Newcastlemax bulk carriers at Qingdao Beihai Shipbuilding.

The 210,000 DWT vessels — Mount Victoria, Mount Yulong and Mount Wuyi — are the third, fourth and fifth ships in a 14-vessel Newcastlemax series being built at the Chinese yard, Cyril Ducau, CEO of EPS, said in a LinkedIn post yesterday. All three ships were delivered five months ahead of their contracted delivery dates.

The project involves CSSC Group and Qingdao Beihai Shipbuilding, with financing support from Sinosure, OCBC and China Exim Bank. The vessels will be chartered to Shourong Shipping, part of Shougang Group, a major Chinese steel producer whose raw material imports, notably iron ore, are a key driver of Newcastlemax demand on routes to China.

LNG dual-fuel Newcastlemax bulkers of this type are typically employed on long-haul iron ore runs from Brazil and Australia to China, where fuel choice has a significant impact on emissions over the voyage length. Bulk carriers remain one of the smaller segments of the LNG-fuelled fleet, and orders for dual-fuel bulkers are watched as an indicator of how decarbonisation investment is spreading beyond container ships and car carriers, which have led adoption to date.

According to data from classification society DNV, the global LNG-fuelled fleet currently comprises 942 vessels, including 251 container ships, 154 car carriers and 73 bulk carriers.

With nine further vessels still to come in the series, the pace of remaining deliveries will indicate how Chinese yards' dual-fuel bulker production scales up.

Source: Ship & Bunker