Second-time Acceleration of Standardization of Yangtze River Ship Type

Reporter Shi Jingli

There is an analogy in the Yangtze River shipping industry: “without ship type standardization, our advanced waterway network does not worth a cent, just like driving an ox cart on the highway” . At present, with Guidance for Promoting Yangtze River Economic Zone based on Golden Watercourse, and 2014-2020 Yangtze River Economic Zone Comprehensive Three-dimensional Transport Corridor Project being introduced, the Yangtze River shipping industry has ushered in a new era.

Judging from state policies, the nation has developed a series of measures in respects of organization guarantee, system guarantee, economic incentives,financial guarantee and etc. In this context, updating ship type represents the general trend. In aspects of security and environmental protection, the nation has improved restrictions and standards for vessels, and prevention of chemical, oil and air pollution will be the focus of ship type standardization.

In the first place, compared with the foreign advanced level and the demand of market economy, the overall condition of the type of the ship operating in the Yangtze River is still lagging behind. The first is that ship type and type of machinery are not well planned;the second is ship technology is outdated; the third is the new type of specialized ship type is still vacant and the standardization and serialization have not yet achieved;the fourth is the transportation mode is old. There is still long way to go to revert this situation. Secondly,there is the problem of large type of ship. With the improvement of the level of the Yangtze waterway,large type of ship should be the natural result. However,whether large type ship is suitable for the Yangtze River ship? In addition, the seamless connection between ports, shipowners, ship yards, design institutes, cargo owners and waterway has not been achieved and the standardization is lagging behind.

Guided by CCS headquarters, Wuhan Rules and Research Institute carried out research on golden waterway construction and plan a long time ago. It proposed four possible ship types which may become the main ship type for Yangtze River: multi-purpose ship to resolve cargo logistics; sea-river ship, which is heavily demanded by shipowners and will become the key development project during the 13thfive-year plan;the third is LNG ship, a future trend; and the fourth is commodity car ro-ro ships, a well developed one and the current industry layout is very reasonable.

In the aspect of ship standards, CCS actively cooperates with MOT Water Transportation Bureau and Yangtze River shipping Bureau to push forward the standardization research work on inland river ship type;providing technical support for the standardization of inland river ship type and on-line analysis tools for governments, ship owners and design institutes. In the area of LNG ships, CCS is capable to provide onestop and effective solutions for the industry through large amount of effective research on the whole LNG industry chain covering transportation, refueling and application.