The Natalie O. Warren was one of the first gas tankers .
history
Towards the end of the Second World War, the Warren Petroleum Corporation from Tulsa, Oklahoma, identified the increasing transport demand for liquid gas , which until then had been transported in individual tanks on the deck of general cargo ships. They commissioned the Pennsylvania Shipyards in Beaumont, Texas with the design and construction of a new type of special ship, which should only transport liquefied gas. In 1946 Warren Petroleum acquired the C1-A ship Cape Diamond, which was completed in February 1944 at the Pusey & Jones shipyard in Wilmington, in order to have it converted. In the summer of 1947, Pennsylvania Shipyards had completed the plans, took over the Cape Diamond and converted it into one of the first LPG tankers in the world over the next five months .
In November 1947, the ship began liner service between Houston and New York under its new name, Natalie O. Warren . After fourteen years of service with Warren Petroleum, the ship was sold to another gas shipping pioneer, Oivind Lorentzen. He used the ship from 1961 to the end of 1966 under the name Mundogaz West in trade between West Indies-Curacao and the South American east coast. On January 15, 1967, the Mundogaz West reached Vigo, Spain, where it was to be scrapped. But it was later brought to Santander , where it finally arrived on June 30, 1967 for demolition.
technology
When the Natalie O. Warren was built, there were no regulations from the classification societies . As a result, a number of problems had to be overcome, especially in the planning phase. For example, all weld seams were tested with magnetic powder and all weld seams over 3.5 centimeters thick were x-rayed. The ship was one of the oldest type of gas tanker that transported its cargo at ambient temperature. The gases were liquefied at a pressure of around 17-18 bar. In order to withstand this pressure, the walls of the cargo tanks were very thick. They weighed up to 50 tons and gave the ship a high dead weight. The 68 upright cylindrical cargo tanks had a diameter between 2.43 and almost four meters and were between 7.62 and 14.63 meters high. Therefore, they do not fully utilize the volume of the hull, which reduces the cargo capacity compared to the existing ship space. The Natalie O. Warren had less than 4500 m³ cargo tank volume.
