Australia's FFI to test first green ammonia fueled vessel by Q3

Australia's Fortescue Future Industries plans to test its first green ammonia-fueled ship as early as the third quarter and sail it to Dubai in time for the COP28 global climate change summit, its president for south and southeast Asia, Allard M. Nooy, said at the Energy Asia 2023 conference in Malaysia.

Nooy said that Fortescue is working with shipyards and the government in Singapore on a vessel that will replace diesel engines on board with green ammonia engines.

"We're working with the regulator in Singapore to get that certified by DNV. And fingers crossed that ship will be out in the waters in Q3 on green ammonia and potentially sailing to Dubai for COP28," he said at the conference.

In November 2021, FFI Chairman Andrew Forrest had called for a net-zero 2040 target for the entire shipping industry and said the company was converting a 75-meter vessel, the MMA Leveque, in collaboration with MMA Offshore over a 12-month period, to run "almost totally" on green ammonia.

Earlier in 2021, FFI's Green Fleet Team achieved the successful combustion of blended ammonia fuel in a locomotive, paving the way to achieve a renewable locomotive operation using 100% green ammonia.

Nooy said at the Kuala Lumpur conference that FFI, the world's third-largest iron ore mining company and producer, was investing 10% of net profit after tax of the parent company on decarbonization.

This would cover: decarbonizing the entire mining operation in the Pilbara region in Western Australia by 2030, which would mean no more fossil fuels for hauling trucks and locomotives and no more thermal power; developing in-house technologies like hydrogen electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen or green ammonia; and assisting hard-to-abate industries and the rest of the world to decarbonize, Nooy said.

"We're developing large-scale renewable energy projects for the purpose of producing either green electrons or using these green electrons to produce green molecules," he said, which would include green hydrogen for domestic supply or green ammonia for export purposes.

He said by 2030, FFI's Scope 1 and 2 emissions will be real zero and for Scope 3, which covers the entire supply chain including shipping -- an extremely hard to abate industry -- the commitment is for potential offsets and net zero.

Singapore initiatives

Both Singapore's marine regulator, the Maritime Port Authority, and its energy regulator, the Energy Market Authority, launched an expression of interest earlier in the year to import green ammonia, Nooy said.

He added that there were two drivers for the EOI -- to test green ammonia as a fuel alternative to natural gas for power generation and to create a green ammonia bunkering facility in Singapore.

"Singapore doesn't want to lose its [status as] battery for marine fuels of Asia. So they will need to look at alternatives for that," Nooy said.

He said both regulators received an overwhelming response and they looked at where that green ammonia is going to be supplied from, where you can produce it competitively and where the liquid infrastructure plus the shipping infrastructure is available.

"So countries like Australia, but similarly India will be ultimately potential suppliers of green ammonia into OECD countries like Singapore. But South Korea and Japan are going to follow a similar pathway," Nooy said.