RTP FTI-Pilot

The overall vision of the RPT project is to upscale, pilot and commercialise our unique and breakthrough Rapid Purge Technology (RPT) for cleaning cargo tanks on liquefied gas and liquefied petroleum tankers, which renders obsolete the nitrogen gas purging methods used throughout the world tanker fleet today. Each time the gas carrier shall take on board a new type of cargo, hours and day are wasted at the harbour in order to clean the cargo tanks from the previous cargo and prepare the cargo tanks to receive the new cargo. Tons of valuable cargo products are also emitted to the atmosphere during these cleaning operations. Tanker owners can drastically reduce idle time in port by up to 70 hours, cut their port fees, save 2% of the cargo that is presently lost, improve the utilisation of their carrying capacity by 8-10%, lower the use and extend the working life of on-board nitrogen gas generators, completely avoid losses of cargo methane and halve the greenhouse impact of each natural gas transport. Environgas AS (EGA) and our consortium partners (Büscherhoff Spezialverpackung GmbH (Germany) and Tritec Production Sp. z o.o. (Poland)) have successfully built and validated the system in an operational environment and now plan to take the final steps towards TRL9 and full commercialisation, with the H2020 Fast Track to Innovation Pilot funding call. The current TRL6 prototype is designed for LPG ships of all sizes with type C cargo tanks, from the smallest ships with only one or two cargo tanks to the very largest with 6 cargo tanks. The most interesting market for RPT, however, is estimated will be the smaller and medium size ships. A standard tank is 10-15m in diameter and 30-35m in length. In new build vessels, each cargo tank will have four RPT units, each about 4m in height and projecting along the uppermost exterior surface of the tank. Older vessels with retrofitted RPT units will typically need six or seven units per cargo tank.