S. Korean shipbuilders eye big LNG tanker orders from Qatar

South Korean shipbuilders are going all out to vie for 40 units of super large liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessels from Qatar’s state-owned oil company Qatar Petroleum (QP) which recently visited their shipbuilding sites.

QP officials toured major shipyards in Korea, China and Japan to assess their capacities to build super-sized LNG carriers, according to TradeWinds, a global shipbuilding trade journal last week.

QP’s visit to the local dockyards came after Qatar in September announced that it would scale up production of LNG by 43 percent by expanding lines in North Dome, the world`s largest offshore gas field.

Qatar needs a large number of new LNG carriers to meet its LNG capacity from 2023. QP is expected to order 30 to 40 super-sized LNG carriers with 210,000 to 266,000 cubic meters (Q-Max, Q-Flex), TradeWinds reported.

Korean shipbuilders have gotten their hopes up as they secured big orders for LNG carriers from Qatar for the last 10 years ago. They swept all of the proposed 45 LNG carriers from Qatar from 2004 to 2007, with 19 taken by Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, 18 by Samsung Heavy Industries and eight by Hyundai Heavy Industries.

The Korean big three shipbuilders brought home 66 orders out of 70 LNG carriers last year.
Source: Pulse