Mitsui OSK Lines of the shipping major makes a capital participation of 25% of Larvik Shipping （LS）headquartered in Norway which engages in the transport ship management of liquefied CO2 in Europe.

LS established in 1988 has been engaged in the maintenance and management with personnel dispatch services for the ships which transport industrial LCO2 from the production site to consuming areas for more than 30 years. Although the business areas are limited to the North Sea zone including Norway, Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands etc., LS is the only company in the world that possesses the know-how of marine transportation of liquefied CO2.

At present LS has contracts of ship management for one vessel with Linde and four vessels with Nippon Gases under Nippon Sanso Holdings. An estimated transport volume of liquefied CO2 is at 350 to 400 thousand tons annually.

The ships to transport liquefied CO2 have a structure to store inside the cylindrical type-C tank which is adopted also for LPG or LNG ships. The temperature and pressure of liquefied CO2 in the tank are kept at -15℃and 1.5 to 1.8MPa nearly equivalent to those in a tank truck. The overall length of about 80m is comparatively small in the category of cargo ships. (according to our estimation)

Mitsui OSK Lines plays the main role in the carbon recycling plan to utilize the CO2 from factory wastes for the methanation fuel for ships, and also accelerates its efforts to advance into the CCUS field such as the participation in the project of DeepC Store (Australia) and Northern Lights (Norway) which press in/store industrially emitted CO2 into deep sea. It is indispensable in this undertaking to have an appropriate knowledge about the operation of ships which are capable for a marine transportation of liquefied CO2. That is why MOL approached LS for an equity participation which has years’ experiences in this field. LS, on the other hand, anticipated a great merit to pave a way to expand its business categories and scope of area, and accepted the capital participation.

MOL has had a wish to deepen its involvement in CCUS s including storage as well as transportation, and evaluated highly LS’ s participation in the group at this time, and showed its outlook saying, “The CO2 handled by CCUS has quite a big market than that of LCO2 for industrial use, and there will be requirements for ships for transportation loaded with tanks having much larger capacity to store at a much lower temperature and pressure than now. We would like to discuss with LS for such development and operation.”