Shipbuilders to expand business/Megafloats for mining to help firms fight for bigger share of world market

Amid heated competition with South Korea and China, the government together with major shipbuilding and heavy machinery companies is jointly developing megafloats with the aim of expanding their business overseas using advanced, domestically developed technology.
According to the Shipbuilders' Association of Japan and other organizations, supply continues to exceed demand in the global shipbuilding market. There is a possibility of the order backlog of major domestic shipbuilding firms dropping to zero by the end of 2013.
Since the demand for newly built ships peaked around 2011, new orders have dramatically decreased, and the country has been exposed to severe price competition with China and South Korea, with the effect of keeping prices of cargo ships down.
The shipbuilding industry has recently focused on marine development such as mining and purification of offshore oil and natural gas, as well as freighters for liquefied natural gas and crude oil megatankers.
The sites where marine resources are mined have moved to pelagic zones after mining in coastal waters was largely exhausted. As coastal regions are separated from the mining sites by hundreds of kilometers, megafloats are necessary as transit waypoints.
The nation's shipbuilding industry has been conducting research on the development of megafloats since 1995. One notable example of such a project is the Shirashima oil storage station in Kitakyushu.
A megafloat in Shizuoka that had been used as a deep-sea fishing park was utilized as a storage point for radiation-contaminated water that had been used to cool the damaged reactors and nuclear fuel at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fuskushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
A development project to extract marine resources off the coast of Brazil, for which Japan has sought to supply equipment, is estimated to attract about 10 trillion yen in investment by 2020.
Mining of the seafloor in Japan's exclusive economic zone, where methane hydrate, a next-generation fuel, is believed to be buried, is also planned.
South Korea has also taken the lead in the market of offshore plants equipped with mining and purification facilities. South Korea's 2011 market share was 39 percent, whereas Japan's was only 1 percent.
Domestic shipbuilders expect to receive financial support from the government to launch an offensive in the market of marine development with a focus on megafloats.
Source: Yomiuri