Wärtsilä moves another step forward on CCS-Ready scrubbers

Wärtsilä Exhaust Treatment’s engineers examine CCS performance in the company’s test hall in Moss, Norway. [Photo:© Wärtsilä]

Saying that its CCS-Ready scrubbers are now “being sold at pace,” Wärtsilä is now offering carbon capture and storage (CCS) feasibility studies to shipowners and operators. Studies have already been conducted on a range of vessel types including RO/RO and ROpax vessels, a drill ship, a container vessel and a gas carrier.

The process takes four to six months of study and design work. Wärtsilä Exhaust Treatment’s specialists become involved in ship design at an early stage to conduct engineering work to understand how CCS can be smoothly integrated once the technology is launched to market.

Wärtsilä is conducting the feasibility studies on both newbuild and existing vessels. Retrofit CCS installations will be significantly smoothed if a scrubber is already onboard and the Wärtsilä CCS-Ready scrubbers now on the market are installed onboard in a way that will enables a CCS system to be easily added easily when the technology is commercialized. They are also designed to enable smooth integration with a particulate matter filter.

Once completed, the CCS feasibility study enables Wärtsilä to provide customers with a fully rounded commercial offer that can be shared with shipyards to get an exact quote for installation. During the feasibility studies, Wärtsilä’s specialists closely examine the existing naval architecture of the ship and work to understand how the power, space and exhaust demands of CCS can be accommodated onboard. Owners will receive a qualified analysis of the costs of CCS integration, and a clear list of considerations on how a potential retrofit would be conducted in the least intrusive way.

Conducting the studies today enables Wärtsilä to bring forward the early stages of CCS integration and, in doing so, lower the barrier to entry once the technology is commercialized, which Wärtsilä says is “in the near future.” The studies also serve to educate customers on the upsides and particular considerations associated with installing CCS onboard their vessels. Finally, as the studies will run in parallel with the implementation of new environmental regulations for shipping, owners who conduct them today will be “ahead of the curve” compared with peers.

“Launching these feasibility studies and being able to offer them to market is the exciting latest step in our process of bringing carbon capture and storage to market in shipping,” says Sigurd Jenssen, director, Wärtsilä Exhaust Treatment. “It builds on the market-leading work we are conducting in our test hall in Moss, where our technology is already demonstrating our targeted 70% capture rate, and enables us to directly engage with customers to smooth the CCS adoption process in the near future.”

“By conducting these studies today, we are already building a considerable track record and understanding of how this technology will work across multiple vessel types,” says Jenssen. “It builds on the considerable uptake we have already seen for our CCS-Ready scrubbers, which show that the industry is not only exploring CCS as a speculative technology, but is actively investing in its foundations as a decarbonization solution. We look forward to conducting more of these studies in the coming months as we work to bring our CCS system to market.”