The ship was commissioned by the United States War Shipping Administration from the Bethlehem Fairfield shipyard in Baltimore. The Liberty ship was laid down on April 24, 1943 and launched on May 24 as Thomas F. Bayard . After delivery on May 31, 1943, it went to the Norwegian state as Edvard Grieg in a bareboat charter under the management of Nortraship in London . In December 1946, Andreas Stray from Farsund acquired the ship and in February 1950 the Edvard Grieg was transferred to the Osloer Gesellschaft A / S Sobral of the Norwegian shipping company Øivind Lorentzen.
After the end of the Second World War, the need to transport liquid gas increased , which until then had been transported in individual tanks on the deck of general cargo ships. In November 1947 the Natalie O. Warren of the Warren Petroleum Corporation, one of the first liquefied gas tankers in the world, began the liner service between Houston and New York, which was shortly followed by another liquefied gas tanker converted in the United States. Øivind Lorentzen was one of the pioneers in gas shipping. He initially sold Edvard Grieg to the Brilliant Transportation Company in Panama, which was part of the Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, from which the ship was transferred to the LPG Carriers in Monrovia, which was connected with Lorentzen and who bought the ship through the agency of Deutsche Vacuum Oel Aktiengesellschaft in Hamburg Howaldtswerke in Kiel was converted into a gas tanker.
After the conversion, the ship was used in trade between Texas and the South American east coast from July 1952. In August 1961 the gas tanker was transferred to A / S Gasskib, which was also part of Øivind Lorentzen, and was renamed Mundogaz São Paulo . In February 1969 the ship was taken out of service and transferred to Mundogas (Storage), which in turn belonged to Lorentzen and used it as a gas tank terminal in Santos. After the machinery was removed in 1971, the ship was deleted from the register in 1972. The further whereabouts are unknown.
technology
The conversion to LPG tanker was in parallel by the classification societies American Bureau of Shipping and Det Norske Veritas certified. 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 15 bar. To withstand this pressure, the walls of the cargo tanks were 33 mm thick. They weighed up to 50 tons and gave the ship a high dead weight. The 66 upright cylindrical cargo tanks had a diameter of up to 3.83 meters and were up to 14.65 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 Ultragaz São Paulo had a cargo tank volume of 7248 m³ and could transport 3804 tons of liquid gas.
literature
"Ultragaz - Sao Paulo" the first gas tanker built in Germany in "Schiff und Hafen" Vol. 4, No. 7, July 1952, p. 230.
Gas tanker "Ultragaz - Sao Paulo" in "Schiff und Hafen" Vol. 4, No. 8, August 1952, pp. 316-318.
