Southern China, A Lng Shipping Company Fleet Planning Study

Because of the continuous development of economy and the shortage of crude oil, the Chinese import volume of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) has increased quickly. However, the production of Chinese natural gas cannot meet the domestic ever growing demand. Considering the requirement of economy development, the huge gap must be filled by the import. And most of the import natural gas is transported into China by sea and pipeline. This special demand of transportation, which comes from the LNG project all over the country, has created a very nice opportunity to the LNG shipping company. A good fleet deployment plan plays very important role for shipping company in keeping competitive advantage and going from strength to strength.On the basis of looking back the theory, research method and fruit of ship deployment, I summarize the environments and influencing factors to a shipping company development. And then the develop strategy of underway Chinese LNG shipping company is set up as the studying subject of this paper.To analyzing the market circumstances of development and ascertaining the developing scale of the shipping company, the paper focus in the world and Chinese LNG transportation market. After this the whole developing trend of LNG import by quantitative analysis method. Then the paper studies the history of world LNG shipping and the real condition of Chinese LNG shipping company. In referring the advanced experience of foreign LNG shipping company, the chance of development for Chinese shipping company has appeared and the company should deploy its own fleet. On the basis of analyzing the import routes and computing transportation volume, the LNG ship fleet size and real developing strategies are obtained by dynamic program method.The core of the thesis is to establish a mathematical modal in order to have researches on the strategy of the fleet's growth year by year. A hypothesis being the prerequisite and the object being China's LNG shipping fleets which enlarge their scale by purchasing new ships and renting ships, the thesis will set up a dynamic planning modal so as to achieve the purpose of minimizing the cost within the period of planning. By working out a solution to the modal, a best development strategy, or a detailed strategy for annual ship purchase and rent, will be put forward. Finally an example of how to calculate the modal will be listed, then the best strategy of the fleet's development within the period of planning will be arrived at.In the numerous papers on LNG, there is only small amount of them studying the shipping fleet. The dynamic programming method is applied for the fleet deployment problem in this thesis and a practical solution is adopted to solve the problem. The main purpose is to provide a practical way for the LNG shipping company on the fleet deployment problem.