BASF presents innovative tanker

Dutch yard and shipping group Mercurius Shipping will build a new river tanker for German chemicals company BASF specially designed to operate at extreme low water levels in the river Rhine.

BASF developed the ship design together with a consortium consisting of Duisburger Entwicklungszentrum für Schiffstechnik und Transportsysteme e.V, (DST), Technolog Services GmbH and Agnos Consulting, who specialise in various aspects of shipbuilding. Shipping group Stolt Tankers takes over the subsequent detailed design and will operate the tanker exclusively for BASF. Delivery is scheduled for 2022.

The Rhine is a key waterway for the transport of chemicals in Europe. During a longer period of dry weather, vessels are unable to fully load, increasing transport costs and delaying products. Stolt Tankers said that the new vessel will still be able to pass the critical point in the Rhine near Kaub, carrying 650 tonnes of cargo even at a water depth of 1.60m, which is significantly more than any other tanker available today. German companies faced supply bottlenecks and production problems in 2018 after a drought and heatwave led to unusually low water levels on the Rhine.

"Following our experience with the low water levels of the Rhine in 2018 and based on our assessment that such events may occur more frequently in the future, we have taken a whole range of measures at the Ludwigshafen site (in Germany) to increase the security of supply for production. An important element of our considerations was to have a ship that can still reliably transport substantial quantities even at the lowest Rhine levels," said Dr Uwe Liebelt of BASF European Site Management. "We took the initiative ourselves in 2018, because a suitable ship was not available on the market.”

The new ship will be 135m long and 17.5m wide, which is considerably larger than the standard tankers on the Rhine, which are usually about 110m by 11.5m. At average water depths it has a transport capacity of around 2,500 tonnes, twice that of conventional inland vessels. In order to achieve a high load-bearing capacity with these ship dimensions, a hydrodynamically optimised hull with an adapted propulsion was developed, Stolt said. The ship is powered by three electric motors, which are fed by highly efficient diesel generators of the latest generation with exhaust gas after-treatment. It has ten stainless steel tanks and three separate loading systems are provided.