Success in Ballast Water Treatment
With 28 systems sold to date and a breakthrough on the market for installation on-board offshore vessels in operation, MMC Green Technology AS from Fosnavåg, Norway, has achieved success with the system they have developed for treatment of ballast water on-board vessels.
“We were granted DnV type approval for our system in December 2012. Since then, we have sold 28 systems,” confirms Director of Sales and Marketing Børge Gjelseth. He believes that the company’s success is due to a combination of important factors: that their system is the smallest on the market and takes up least space on-board and that the system has a simple structure and is easy to operate.
Offshore vessels
“So far, we have primarily sold our ballast water management system to shipyards which in turn install the system on-board newbuilds. However, we have now also sold three systems to offshore vessels in existing fleets, a process known as retrofit,” explains Børge Gjelseth.
He goes on to mention Hellix Well Ops UK as an example. Hellix carried out a comprehensive evaluation project involving several systems and concluded that MMC’s BWMS system was the best for their well intervention vessel Well Enhancer. The version of the system installed on the vessel was the MMC BWMS which has capacity to purify up to 150 cubic metres of ballast water per hour.
Well Enhancer is an offshore vessel designed for operations involving existing oil wells and is equipped for DP3. This implies full redundancy and a requirement for two ballast water treatment systems on-board. “Hellix is a very important customer and reference for MMC Green Technology,” confirms the Director of Sales and Marketing.
MMC Green Technology has also signed an agreement for delivery of the BWMS system to Havila, a Norwegian offshore shipowner, for its subsea construction support vessel, Havila Phoenix.
Compact system
“The compact size and simple operability of our system are particularly beneficial for the retrofit market. A large number of existing vessels will struggle even to install our compact skid system due to lack of space and narrow conditions on-board. It is therefore beneficial to be able to split the system up into individual parts or modules,” explains Børge Gjelseth.
MMC Green Technology is a relatively young company in development. They are currently working on building a network of agents worldwide, and the company recently achieved USCG AMS approval for the system. AMS is a provisional approval for operation of the system on-board vessels sailing in American waters.
“As we are building our network of agents, we are concentrating on finding agents who can help provide start-up, service and after sales. So far, we have signed agreements with agents in Singapore and Germany in addition to letters of intent with agents in Spain and Turkey. Norr Systems in Singapore has sold eight MMC BWMS systems to China. Steinback Ingenieurtechnik has sold one system to Lloyd Verft in Bremerhaven,” confirms Director of Sales and Marketing, Børge Gjelseth in MMC Green Technology.