Yokogawa to Automate the World's Largest Liquid Hydrogen Carrier

Yokogawa said on 14 September that it has won orders from Kawasaki Heavy Industries to supply integrated automation systems for a 40,000 cubic metre liquefied hydrogen carrier — described as the world's largest vessel of its type — and for two hydrogen-fuelled ships.

The scope is onboard monitoring and control together with an emergency shutdown function, covering equipment operating at cryogenic temperatures. For the two hydrogen-fuelled vessels Yokogawa is also supplying marine hydrogen fuel systems, consisting of liquefied hydrogen tanks and the fuel supply equipment around them. Product names and delivery dates were not disclosed.

Koji Nakaoka, executive vice president and head of Yokogawa's Energy & Sustainability Business Headquarters, tied the work to the company's LNG record, saying its extensive experience with liquefied natural gas carriers is also being applied to liquefied hydrogen carriers. The vessels belong to a Green Innovation Fund project led by NEDO, Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, supporting the liquefied hydrogen supply chain and maritime decarbonisation.

The engineering gap between LNG and liquid hydrogen is larger than the similar vocabulary suggests. LNG is handled at roughly minus 162 degrees Celsius; liquid hydrogen boils at around minus 253. That difference reaches into instrument selection, material behaviour, insulation, boil-off management and the timing assumptions inside shutdown logic. Hydrogen also has a far wider flammable range and a much lower ignition energy, which changes how leak detection and ESD trip philosophy are designed.

Concrete data points on marine hydrogen control systems are scarce, which is why a named shipbuilder and a stated vessel size are worth recording. The first operating carriers will set the reference that later projects get compared against.