Two six-year-old, 174,000 cu m Korean LNG carriers have anchored within the layup waters of Labuan in Malaysia having remarkably by no means entered the gasoline trades because of defective containment methods. South Korean media recommend the SK Transport vessels – the SK Serenity and SK Spica – are actually prone to be bought for scrap.
Final December a court docket in London dominated that South Korean shipbuilder Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) ought to pay the shipowner $290m to SK Transport on account of defects within the cargo holds of two gasoline carriers. The ships had been ordered 9 years in the past, and made headlines on the time, as they had been the primary to function a brand new Korean developed KC-1 membrane system. Regardless of a number of repairs, the containment methods had been discovered to be defective and the ships by no means traded.
Koreans have been making an attempt to develop their very own gasoline containment methods for years with a view to keep away from paying the sizeable charges to France’s GTT, the world’s dominant supplier of membrane gasoline containment methods for ships buying and selling at present.