World’s largest gas-powered container ship rolls off Shanghai slipway, a milestone for global shipping and China’s shipbuilding

The world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG)-powered container ship rolled off the slipway this week at Shanghai’s Jiangnan-Changxing shipyard, marking a major milestone both for the worldwide shipping industry and China’s shipbuilding.

The CMA CGM Jacques Saadé, named after the late French-Lebanese businessman who founded the world’s fourth-biggest shipping line, is an ultra large container vessel with the capacity to carry 23,112 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) of cargo. It is also the largest vessel to ply the high seas using LNG, instead of sulphur-emitting bunker fuel.

While some shipping lines are installing expensive scrubbers to wash sulphur content from a ship’s exhaust, and others are resorting to low-sulphur fuel to comply with the International Maritime Organisation’s IMO 2020 regulation to drastically cut sulphur emissions, CMA CGM has chosen a different path.

The fuel reduces the emissions of sulphur oxide and fine particles by 99 per cent, nitrogen oxides by 85 per cent and carbon dioxide by around 20 per cent, the shipping line said.

The Jacques Saadé will be the first of nine 23,000-TEU leviathans to be powered by LNG. By 2022, CMA CGM will have 20 LNG-powered ships in operation. CMA CGM is ranked as the world’s fourth largest container shipping line, with 528 vessels, 190 of which are directly owned by the company.