LNG carriers launched with filterless BWTS

Knutsen Group is a large Norwegian shipping conglomerate owning and operating a wide range of oil and gas energy vessels. It has developed its own ballast water treatment system, KBAL BWTS, which is also available to third parties.

KBAL is a ballast water treatment system suitable for the marine environment and compliant with the IMO and USCG D2 discharge standard. It was developed by Knutsen in 2009 and is believed to be the first of its kind to use neither filters nor chemicals.

The manufacturer reports the KBAL is capable of treating water with an ultraviolet transmittance (UVT) as low as 26%, a benefit when operating at ports with tidal changes and consequent reductions in UVT during cargo operation.

In one of the latest installations, the KBAL BWTS was successfully commissioned and approved by class and owner in February 2023, on board the newbuild LNG carrier Grażyna Gęsicka at Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) in Ulsan, South Korea.

This vessel is installed with two KBAL3000 BWTS and follows the commissioning of 174,000-m³ LNG carrier Lech Kaczyński, the first vessel in the series.

Lech Kaczyński was delivered December 2022 by HHI, and is bareboat chartered to an affiliate of Norway’s Knutsen Group and time-chartered to Polish Oil Mining and Gas Extraction (PGNiG), which is a Polish state-controlled oil and gas company.

One of the first cargoes lifted by Lech Kaczyński was from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass LNG export facility in the US in February 2023.

PGNiG has chartered Lech Kaczyński to transport cargoes from the US to Poland for 10 years.

Poland had relied on importing natural from Russia, and following the invasion of Ukraine, it has radically switched to pipeline and vessel imports, with the expectation that 2023 will be the first year of zero imports of natural gas from Russia.