GS48A

LNG Shipping at 50|the pioneers
the Conch Océan banner were Gilbert
Massac, Michel Kotcharian and another
ex-Shell man, Bob Jackson.
Going back to the evolution of the
Gazocéan membrane itself, the next stage
involved a seagoing trial. René Boudet,
the company’s president, and his friend
Carol Bennett agreed to build a small
prototype ship to demonstrate the
soundness of the design for LNG and to
show that it could also be used for LPG
and ethylene trading. Delivered in May
1964, the ship was the 630m 3 Pythagore.
René Boudet was one of the gas
industry’s larger-than-life characters.
A formidable pioneer of LPG trading
and transport by sea in the 1950s, he
founded Gazocéan in 1957. Following
the success of the Pythagore prototype
vessel, Boudet then placed a speculative
order in 1968 for the 50,000m 3 Descartes,
the first commercial ship with the
Technigaz Mark I membrane. In 1979
René Boudet moved on from Gazocéan
and created Geogas Enterprise, a
Geneva-based LPG trading company.
One of the attendees at the Oslo test,
Audy Gilles, had also been involved with
the Beauvais project. The Worms Group
man was investigating another potential
membrane material. In particular he was
considering a 36 per cent nickel steel
alloy which the Nobel prize-winning
Swiss physicist Charles Édouard
Guillaume had discovered in 1896 and
named invar. Industrialised by Imphy
Alloys of France, invar has a near-zero
coefficient of thermal expansion.
The Worms Group put Pierre Jean
in charge of a research team to look
at invar in more detail and he was
assisted by Pierre Legendre of Imphy.
By October 1965 the researchers’
confidence in the material was sufficient
Audy Gilles (left) and Pierre
Jean, the men who brought the
Gaz Transport membrane tank
containment system to life
for the Worms Group to establish Gaz
Transport as a new subsidiary.
Six engineers joined president and
founder Audy Gilles as the initial team
members of Gaz Transport. Pierre Jean
headed the group, which included
naval architect Roger Lootvoet and
Jacques Lenormand. Jacques Guilhem,
who had been the engineer in charge of
the Jules Verne project, also joined the
team together with two other Jules Verne
technicians, Michael Bourgeois and
Jean-Pierre Morandi.
Work on the Moss LNG spherical
tank containment system design started
at Moss Værft in Norway in February
1969. Mikal Grønner, the president and
CEO of Moss Rosenberg Værft (MRV),
and his design team set off with a simple
three-pronged strategy. The design had
to provide a high standard of safety; the
construction would have to be based on
traditional shipbuilding methods; and the
initial and operating costs of a spherical
tank ship must be kept low.
The other members of the team were
Hans Jorgen Frank, who joined MRV
from the Lorentzen Group, Ragnar
Bohgaes, the technical director of
Moss Værft, and Olav Solberg, who was
head of the steel structure department at
Kværner Brug. The Kværner engineering
group was the parent of MRV.
In early 1970 DNV was
commissioned to help with the project
and a team was assembled under the
guidance of manager Rolf Kvamsdal.
The society’s Per Tenge, Gunnar Wold
and Odd Solli were directed to weigh up
the choice of materials for the spherical
tanks while Helge Ramstad examined
stress levels and Odd Solumoen
investigated insulation matters.
DNV president Egil Abrahamsen
played an active role in this study,
providing guidance on dealing with
national and other regulatory bodies.
Early on in the study James Howard, a
former US Coast Guard officer, joined
the Kværner Group and his background
proved useful when dealing with
the US maritime authorities. Later
Tormod Grove and Hans Richard
Hansen contributed extensively to the
Moss spherical tank project with input
on stress and fatigue analysis. In January
1971 Rolf Kvamsdal joined MRV as head
of the gas technology department and
quickly became the well-known frontman
and publicist for Moss spheres.
After Methane Princess, Methane
Progress and Jules Verne had established
the initial Algeria-to-Europe LNG
trade lanes, subsequent projects
William Wood Prince is
acknowledged as the father of LNG
generated their own contributions to
the pioneer pool. Esso’s DM Latimer
played a key role in developing both
the shipping and terminal elements
for his company’s Libya venture while
Alexander Delli Paoli was section
head of Esso International’s tanker
department and the man responsible for
the design and construction of the four
41,000m 3 vessels built for the project.
Ed Torney, another naval architect
from the JJ Henry stable, acted as design
and construction advisor to Esso. He
later joined Energy Transportation Corp,
the company which operated the eight
spherical tank ships on the Indonesia-
Japan route on behalf of Burmah Oil.
The Alaska-Japan trade began in
October 1970 and Phillips Petroleum’s
vice-president LeRoy Culbertson and
John Horn in the natural gas sales
department were leading figures in
getting the venture off the ground.
RJ Wheeler, the company’s director
of marine operations, headed the
team responsible for the running of
the two vessels that served the trade,
Polar Alaska and Arctic Tokyo.
There were many other LNG
shipping and terminal pioneers who
did not grab as much limelight as those
mentioned above. As SIGTTO and
GIIGNL point out in their introductory
remarks to this magazine, our industry
owes a great deal of gratitude to all the
pioneers that helped establish the solid
foundation stones that are in place.
This group encompasses not just those
who made the headlines but also those
shipyard workers, welding experts,
steel and aluminium manufacturers,
insulation specialists, electrical engineers
and cryogenic equipment suppliers who
have played key but mostly unsung
roles in logging 50 years of safe LNG
operations. SH
36 I LNG shipping at 50
A SIGTTO/GIIGNL commemorative issue