Today, November 23, 2016, Viking Line Abp informed that it has signed a letter of intent concerning an order for a passenger vessel to be delivered in the spring of 2020, the company said in its press release. The new vessel is planned to serve the Turku (Finland)-Åland Islands (Finland)-Stockholm (Sweden) route. The vessel will be 218 metres in length and have a gross registered tonnage of 63,000 tons. Passenger capacity will be 2,800 people, and the length of its cargo lanes will be 1,500 metres.
The letter of intent was signed with the Chinese company Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry Co. Ltd and the total investment is about 190 million euros. The vessel is intended to be a collaborative project, and the plan is to engage a number of Finnish and other European suppliers, including Deltamarin, Wärtsilä and ABB Marine as well as a number of others.
“Our intention is for the vessel to run on liquefied natural gas (LNG). We have excellent experience with this from the M/S Viking Grace, the first large LNG-powered passenger vessel in the world. Great emphasis has been placed in the planning work on environmentally sound solutions, including new innovative energy-efficient applications. Many years of planning work have gone into this newbuilding project in conjunction with the European Union’s Motorways of the Seas project under the scope of the Connecting Europe Facility funding instrument, which has also included the Port of Turku and the Ports of Stockholm,” says Jan Hanses, Viking Line’s CEO.