Alfa Laval, a cornerstone of the marine industry for over a century, is positioning itself to meet the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly evolving maritime landscape.

Sameer Kalra, President of the Marine Division and Executive Vice President at Alfa Laval, shared his insights with Robban Assafina during Posidonia 2024, where he explored Alfa Laval's response to the latest IMO’s regulations, aimed at decarbonizing the shipping industry by 2050. The interview also shed the light on innovative approaches to reducing fuel consumption and integrating clean fuels, including biofuels, methanol, ammonia, and hydrogen.

We would like to introduce Alfa Laval to our readers.

Alfa Laval has been active in the marine industry for more than a hundred years, having delivered our first separator around the time of World War I to the US Navy in 1919. Today, we deliver engineered solutions across almost all industries, including maritime, built around heat transfer, separation and fluid handling technologies with the aim of improving our customers' performance.

What are Alfa Laval’s plans amid the latest IMO regulations?

The major focus in IMO is to help the shipping industry decarbonize and reach its zero emissions target in 2050. Two potential pathways to get there are enhanced energy efficiency and the use of zero-carbon fuels.

We are working in both directions. We have a broad portfolio of solutions that reduce the energy need or boost energy recovery, such as our OceanGlide air lubrication system and our exhaust gas waste heat recovery systems, respectively. In addition, we are making sure that our product portfolio is fit for purpose for any fuel pathway selected by a ship operator. Until a few years ago, we delivered solutions based on fossil fuels. Now, we have expanded our portfolio to support biofuels and methanol. Through the coming years, we expect our portfolio will be able to handle ammonia, hydrogen or any other fuel selected by a shipowner.

We anticipate that the future will be about clean energy and energy efficiency, and that is what we are preparing for - future-proof solutions that fit ship owners’ perspectives.

What about alternative fuels?

Our understanding of the future is that there will be no one solution that will fit all. A lot of renewable electrical capacity will be needed to generate all these e-fuels, whether it is green methanol or green ammonia and this is not currently available. Also, different ship segments will go for different fuels, depending on their trade and trading pattern. So, the fuel transition will be a multi-fuel and multi decade journey.

What are Alfa Laval’s BWTS future plans? 

At Alfa Laval, we are continuously innovating our products. Our PureBallast 3 Ultra is just another example of such innovation. The system is designed for ease of installation and use by our customers.

How do you evaluate the first half of 2024? And what is next for Alfa Laval? 

The shipping industry has been through a low shipbuilding cycle between 2016-2020. We have since seen an upturn of shipyard contracting to a more normalized level from the beginning of 2021 and expect reasonably good market conditions in the foreseeable future.  

As Alfa Laval, we believe that we all have a collective responsibility as an industry to make sure that we can get to net zero emissions by 2050. Increased collaboration and partnerships will facilitate this journey.

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	Issue 91 of Robban Assafina (May/ June 2024)