SAL Heavy Lift in world-first use of hydrogen, methanol injection technology

Hamburg’s SAL Heavy Lift has become the first shipping company in the world to adopt a new hydrogen/methanol technology to its fleet. SAL Heavy Lift has been working on this injection technology called FS Marine+ with Germany’s Fuelsave for the past four years.

“By dynamically injecting a mix of hydrogen, oxygen, water and methanol into selected parts of the air intake of both the main engine and the auxiliary engines, the FS MARINE+ system ensures a much cleaner and thorough combustion process, resulting in reduced primary fuel consumption alongside lowering emissions and air pollution,” SAL Heavy Lift explained in a release.

A prototype on a generator engine was tested on one of SAL’s ships called Annette for more than two years with significant fuel savings, as well as emission and air pollution reductions, verified by third parties both during field trials and in laboratory tests.

The FS Marine+ generator has proven to make average reductions of 10% less CO2, 15% less SOx, 30-80% less NOx and 40% less particle emissions.

SAL’s Trina will now be retrofitted with the system next month with another five ships from the SAL fleet also slated for retrofits.

Marc Sima, CEO of Fuelsave, said the technology works with MDO, MGO, HFO, LSFO as well as LNG.