Route99 is designed for users within LNG such as operators, ship owners, traders, oil companies and consultants who are actively involved in planning and analysing sea borne transportation of LNG.
Watch a live demo of Route99 applied on LNG operation
Major LNG projects are being planned and built under long term sales contracts with importers, and such deals have therefore dominated the market.Since LNG carriers until now have been built to serve dedicated routes linked to these contracts, the market has been relatively rigid and offered few possibilities for efficiency gains.
This is now in the process of changing and a number of producers are reserving volumes for spot trades and great efforts are being made to extract extra gains through arbitrage. This is an area where Route99 can assist in analysing the alternatives and opportunities.
When sufficiently large volumes begin to move where prices are best, the ultimate outcome will be a reduction in differentials between the various markets. Transportation costs for LNG in relative terms to commodity price is high compared to for instance crude oil and therefore the pressure to find optimal transport solutions will increase.
Another factor affecting opportunities for routing LNG between different destinations is the variation in quality requirements from market to market, which can be fairly large. This means that gas produced today for the European market cannot simply be diverted to the USA which needs a lower calorific value than either European or Asian buyers can use
Route99 can assist in finding the optimal combinations of ships and cargoes and can therefore lead to increase trading profit for the traders and a reduced transportation cost for the charterers
An executive introduction to R99 within LNG
Demo run for a fleet of 5 LNG vessels trading on eleven different trade routes in Atlantic basin illustrates the usage of R99 for fleet scheduling
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Various reports generated by Route99:
| Output reports | Input reports |
| Visual schedule | Ship details |
| Voyage summary | Jobs and cargoes to be lifted |
| Voyage details | |
| Tonnage budget | |
| Position list | |
| Allocation of jobs |
Screen shots from LNG demo run:
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Ship details |
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Specification of trade routes: load ports, discharge ports, draft restrictions, time in port etc. |
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Core voyage estimator: Is used to check certain calculations. Otherwise R99 uses the voyage calculations in an automatic mode to calculate hundreds and thousands of potential schedules before it arrives at a schedule that gives the optimal solution - NB all the time taking into account the various constraints that are imposed by the scheduler |
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Resulting vessel schedule: For each vessel is listed jobs for voy1, voy 2 etc |
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Visual schedule: Enables the user to work in visual space by dragging and dropping cargoes between various ships and then check feasibility and economical results |
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Input parameters: To control various optimization analysis |
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Jobs and cargoes to be lifted: Summary of jobs under various contracts and trade routes with laydays |
If vessels are trading in a chartering pool, R99 can generate pool points based on weighting of trade routes, speed/consumption data etc:
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Pool point analysis |
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Graphical presentation of pool points |
Feasibility reports
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Feasibility reports shows all feasible combinations of ships and cargoes |
Tonnage Balance
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R99 allows analysis of tonnage balance: ship days versus cargo days in order to analyse consequences of going long/short on ships and/or cargoes |