Daewoo to build biggest ships

Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co., the world’s No. 3 shipyard, won an order to build the world’s most expensive oil tankers, ships three times the size of the Statue of Liberty, for $139 million each.
The 300,000-ton vessels will be 333 meters (1,090 feet) long and able to carry 2 million barrels of oil, enough energy to supply all of Korea’s 48 million people for one day, Daewoo Shipbuilding said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Global demand for energy, including oil, will increase by about 60 percent by 2030, Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s biggest oil company, said on its Web site. A.P. Moeller-Maersk A/S, the world’s largest shipping line, is among companies paying record prices for ships to move goods as global trade expands.
“Daewoo Shipbuilding’s profitability will improve further after winning orders at record prices,” the shipyard said in the statement.
The tankers will be delivered by April 2011 to a company in Liberia, Daewoo Shipbuilding said, without naming the buyer. The ships were part of $1.6 billion in new orders.
Other contracts were for three 180,000-ton bulk carriers for a shipowner in Greece, eight container vessels for a shipping line in Europe and two vessels that can each carry 6,000 cars for Liberty Maritime Corp. of the United States, Daewoo Shipbuilding said. Shares of Daewoo Shipbuilding gained as much as 1.2 percent to 35,100 won in Seoul.
Meanwhile, state-run Korea Gas Corp., the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) importer, is developing its new technology to store gas on ships.
Korean shipbuilders have had to pay royalties to Gaz Transport & Technigaz, the French firm that owns the gas storage technology used on most of the 219 LNG carriers in operation worldwide. A successful challenge to Gaz would make Korean shipbuilders more competitive as China seeks a larger share of the industry.
Korea Gas, which signed an initial agreement with the Korean Shipbuilders Association last month to develop the system for use on ships, expects to get the technology certified by 2009 before using it commercially in a tanker in 2011, said Kim Sung-bok, an gas official at the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy.
Korea Gas’s system, KC-1, uses two stainless steel-based membranes and different insulation materials to maintain the fuel at very low temperatures and high pressure over a long period, said Yang Young-myung, head of the LNG tank technology center at Korea Gas.