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FlexMarIn - Flexible Marine Infrastructure for Future Energy Value Chains

Natural gas is by far the cleanest fossil fuel. When used instead of oil, it produces 25% less CO2 emissions, 85% less NOx emissions and 99% less SOx and particle emissions. Its impact is even more significant when used instead of coal.

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There is no previous reliable modelling to predict the friction and resulting flow rates for floating, flexible cryogenic pipes.
There is no previous reliable modelling to predict the friction and resulting flow rates for floating, flexible cryogenic pipes.

Therefore, natural gas will be one of the most important energy sources for bridging the gap between today's high-carbon powered world and the long-term renewable-energy future in the short to medium term. However, developing Liquified natural gas (LNG) infrastructure has its challenges. The main bottleneck is the infrastructure costs of the transfer system between LNG carriers and onshore terminals. The current solution to this issue is building quays or jetties, which is time consuming and costly, and does not scale well with the size of the terminal. In order to overcome this barrier to LNG deployment and significantly reduce costs, ECONNECT Energy has developed the IQuay®, a transfer system for fluids.

After its first commercial UTS transfer System in 2017, ECONNECT Energy has established itself as a solid player in the LNG industry, proving that jettyless transfer of LNG is even more advantageous than first thought.

As part of the FlexMarIn project, ECONNECT Energy and SINTEF will work on combining the fields of advanced process technology and hydrodynamics in order to take the IQuay technology to the next level, thereby enabling roll-out of the IQuay on an unprecedented scale and the distribution of cleaner energy to areas not possible today.

Project owner: ECONNECT Energy AS

Key facts

Project duration

2020 - 2024

Funding:

FlexMarIn is an Innovation Projects for the Industrial Sector partly financed by the Research Council of Norway.