ABSTRACT

Unfortunately, so far inability to develop an affordable marine CNG solution has hindered take-off of CNG mode of transport. Reason for this state-of-art is twofold:

• the pressure vessels designed and sometimes certified for marine transport are inadequate, since they are too heavy and/or have a too small diameter; the result is that the CNG ships designed so far are too large and expensive, and with low cargo density in holds, making the marine CNG transport still uncompetitive with pipelines even in short-medium haul distances;

• lack of integration between logistics and ship design has not permitted yet to tailor and optimize a CNG fleet for a specific market; many studies are available (Economides and Mokhatab, 2007; Nikolaou et al., 2009), mainly devoted to modelling the logistics for optimal routing and distribution schedules of CNG ships, but without due identification of the best CNG ships’ size and technical features leading to designing optimal fleets (Trincas, 2014).