Clean Marine offering scrubbers for delivery in January 2020

Speaking at seminar in Singapore on Tuesday Hoy-Petersen said, “It’s not too late to order a scrubber with big capacity for delivery in January and February.” He added that the company could secure yards slots for installation including GRE (glass fibre reinforced epoxy) piping.

With the merger of Clean Marine and FMSI announced on 25 October the company will have a major manufacturing base in Batam, Indonesia with a capacity to produce 50 exhaust gas cleaning units per month. Previously Clean Marine relied on using fabricators in a number of different locations.

Read more: Scrubber suppliers Clean Marine and FMSI plan to merge

While scrubbers have been seen primarily as a solution to comply with IMO 2020 for large vessels such as VLCCs and capesizes, lower priced options for smaller capacity units mean that Clean Marine believes exhaust gas cleaning systems can also be an option for vessels such as MR tankers.

Through Greenseas Finance the company is also offering 90%, non-mortgage finance for scrubbers with repayments spread over 36-months.

The merger with FMSI, with the joint company to be branded Clean Marine, has been driven a need for consolidation after a large number of players entered the market during the boom of scrubber orders in 2018. Hoy-Petersen said: “2019 has been slower and since a lot of people have come into this market consolidation is necessary.”

The merged Clean Marine will move up the ranks to the be the fifth largest scrubber manufacturer from 10^th at present according to DNV GL rankings. The company will be 100% dedicated to the exhaust gas cleaning system business.

Clean Marine believes the market for scrubbers will rebound and Hoy-Petersen noted the fuel price spread between high sulphur fuel oil and low sulphur was “widening and solid into 2020”.

At present Clean Marine is heavily into the installation phase of scrubber units with 15 installations ongoing at present and 72 more in pipeline.

With many scrubber retrofits taking significantly longer than expected resulting in delays and logjams at shipyards the seminar dwelt on some of the issues that can arise during planning and installation.

Kapil Berry, vp – MRO Division for OCS Services, and with experience of scrubber installation previously with BW Group, stressed the importance of planning ahead. “Engineering, shipyards, everyone is up to their eyeballs with work and unless you plan well this can become a big challenge.

“All of those who have experienced engineering for scrubbers – it’s interesting to say the least.” Berry said it was much more complex than for Ballast Water Treatment Systems.

Mudit Mehrotra, assistant vice president for Great Eastern Shipping Co, said that issues can be thrown up during the installation process that did not come up during the design process.

From the manufacturer side Svien Ole Strommen, coo of Clean Marine, noted owners shifted the schedule of which ships would be retrofitted according to where the vessels were trading at the time.