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SeaRoad launches LNG-fuelled RoRo freight vessel

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LNG Industry,


SeaRoad has announced that it has launched the Searoad Mersey II – an LNG-fuelled RoRo freight vessel for service in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. It is both larger and faster than the namesake vessel it replaces, although several months of completion work and trials need to be carried about before the vessel is ready for service. It is expected to travel to Australia in late October 2016 and enter six-days-a-week overnight Bass Strait service between Devonport and Melbourne in December 2016.

Robyn Kelly, the Wife of Chas Kelly, Chairman of parent company SeaRoad Holdings, christened the vessel at the Flensburger shipyard in Germany.

The vessel, which is the first to be designed and commissioned in the 21st century specifically for Bass Strait trade, represents an investment over AUS$110 million in Tasmania’s future and its connection to the Australian mainland. It is the first coastal ship in Australia to use LNG fuel-and-power technology, and the first pure dry cargo ship in the world to utilise a roll-on roll-off LNG supply.

The SeaRoad Mersey II’s main engines are dual-fuel, but, in regular service, the vessel will only use diesel for less than 1% of its operations.

Chas Kelly said: “This is a Tasmanian-grown project that ticks the right boxes about environmental responsibility, clever thinking, world-leading technology and commercial sustainability.

“SeaRoad customers will be able to tell their own clients that the produce, goods and equipment they’re shipping from or to Tasmania will be transported by the most environmentally efficient method. Clean and green not only defines Tasmania, it ships from here too.”

Edited from press release by David Rowlands

Read the article online at: https://www.lngindustry.com/liquid-natural-gas/10062016/searoad-launches-lng-fuelled-roro-freight-vessel-2581/

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