Electrification of the docks and transition to liquefied natural gas (LNG) are the two big bets of the Port of Barcelona for the coming years in its objective of contributing to the decontamination of the metropolitan area of ??the Catalan capital. The path in this sense is beginning to be marked: throughout last year the port carried out a total of 199 LNG supply operations on ships that totaled 143,000 cubic meters. This figure doubles that of the last reference year, when 65,000 cubic meters of LNG were reached.
The president of the Port Authority of Barcelona, ??Lluís Salvadó, announced these data today in a press conference in which he reiterated the will of the institution he presides to bet on this transition fuel as the shortest-term solution. to reduce the environmental impact of port activity and maritime transport.
Since 2017, there has been sustained growth in the supply of LNG to ships, but the increase in prices as a result of the war in Ukraine very substantially reduced the use of this fuel in 2022. It was just a parenthesis: the Normalization of prices and the entry into service of a supply barge based in Barcelona, ??the Haugesund Knutsen, has led to a very notable growth in the number of operations, especially ship to ship, which have already multiplied by three. compared to 2021. This increase has meant that the percentage of LNG supply with respect to total fuels (the most used are fuel oil and diesel) has gone from just 0.2% in 2021 to 5.8% in the 2023.
In fact, Barcelona is already one of the first European ports in the ranking of LNG use. The launch of the Haugesund Knutsen, with a capacity of 5,000 m3, owned by the Knutsen Scale Gas company and commercially managed by Shell, has made it possible to greatly increase supply services to ships, especially the Carnival group’s cruise ships. This barge carried out 66 supply operations to cruise ships last year, a figure that multiplies the 18 operations in 2021 or the 14 in 2022. For its part, Balearia, which supplies LNG to its ships using tanker trucks, carried out 133 operations with 15,500 m3 of gas transferred. Furthermore, at the end of the year, the first LNG bunkering operation was carried out on a cargo ship, specifically a vehicle carrier.
Of the 8,783 ship calls that arrived in Barcelona last year, a total of 618 were ships powered by LNG, double the number in 2022. In this way, NOX has been reduced by 400 tons, a 10% reduction in emissions. emissions.
The use of LNG, always as a transition fuel towards zero-emission fuels, is part of the Port of Barcelona’s energy transition plan, which aims to decarbonize port activity and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by half on the horizon. by 2030 and be an emissions-neutral port by 2050.
This plan includes the Nexigen project to connect ships to electricity when they are docked in the port, the generation of electrical energy with solar panels in port facilities to move towards energy self-sufficiency and the promotion of new fuels.
In this context, the Port of Barcelona contemplates the reservation of spaces for the future production of green fuels and renewable energies. In the short term, the construction of a green methanol production plant with priority use as a zero-emission fuel for ships stands out. Meanwhile, the feasibility of building a waste biomethane production plant within the port facilities is being studied. Biomethane is the carbon-neutral emissions fuel that will precisely replace LNG in ship propulsion.
