Cochin Shipyard has orders for 65 vessels worth ₹22,000 crore, eyes green ships
Cochin Shipyard Ltd (CSL) is focusing on green energy vessels, planning to deliver 65 ships worth over ₹22,000 crore, including 14 naval ships and 22 coastal ships for European clients. Chairman Madhu S. Nair emphasized the shift towards less-polluting fuels like methanol and hydrogen. CSL is pursuing technology transfer agreements and testing a hydrogen fuel cell ferry in Varanasi.
India’s leading shipbuilder Cochin Shipyard Ltd (CSL) is focusing on building modern vessels powered by green energy, as it looks to deliver 65 ships worth over ₹22,000 crore from global and domestic clients, including the India Navy, its chairman and managing director Madhu S. Nair said.
The move comes amid global concerns over carbon emissions that exacerbate climate change, with the focus now gradually shifting to building ‘green ships’ – vessels that run on less-polluting fuels such as methanol, electricity, green hydrogen and hybrid batteries.
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“CSL has an all-time high order book of around ₹22,000 crore, involving building 65 ships, with bulk of the orders for making 14 Naval ships and 22 coastal ships for the European clients including those from Germany, Norway, Cyprus and the Netherlands. Apart from these, we have our focus on making green ships and are already fulfilling orders from abroad for hydrogen fuel cell and methanol ships, electric ships, hybrid ships and other sophisticated ships – commissioning, support and operations vessels (CSOV) for a British and German- Cyprus clients,” Nair told Mint in an interview.
Scaling up
While most of the green ship technologies involving fuel cell, methanol, and electric are being incorporated at present, and CSL uses them to make ships for the western markets, it is now looking at technology transfer agreements with a few European shipping technology companies to scale up and take up complete manufacturing of these new-age ships for both global and Indian markets.
“Under ‘Make in India, make for the World’, we are having global partnerships in all areas where domestic technology has still not matured. We will also look at technology transfer from some of our partners. Other than that, we have developed technology for small vessels running on hydrogen fuel cells. A ferry built on this technology will be tested on our inland waterways near Varanasi. It would be a technology demonstrator now and would be scaled up and adopted in future for commercial production of these green vessels,” Nair added.
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