HANSA: What's your offer to the shipping industry? Yu Wang: Besides finance leasing solutions, our subsidiary CIMC ORIC can provide modern designs of commercial and offshore vessels to the customer. Furthermore, we have two shipyards fully integrated into CIMC group and are shareholders in one more shipyard. It is our aim to combine all these capabilities. It is our ambition not only to provide the design, ship building capacities and finance leasing but also become one of the important suppliers of methanol to the shipping industry. We will also set up a methanol plant in China to produce green methanol, and the capacity will be increased as the demand rises. Why does CIMC rely in particular on methanol as the future fuel? Yu Wang: Green energy has high potential to help the shipping industry to get forward with the decarbonization, and fuels will play an important role. Our group pays great attention to it. We have done a lot of research on this, so we think that methanol as a marine fuel has many advantages compared to LNG, ammonia, or hydrogen when it comes to temperature, safety, supply and even equipment -if not now than in the next 20 years. While the production costs will initially be higher than those of other alternative fuels such as synthetic natural gas (SNG), its handling costs will be lower in the long run. Methanol has been used for decades as a base chemical in many industries - which means that all processes are well known and documented. In the future, the production costs of green methanol will significantly decrease whereas demand and supply will increase significantly, including in the container feeder segment.
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