A very short list
Most kinds of ship can be built in dozens of yards. An LNG carrier cannot.
South Korea has been the centre of the industry for two decades. Hanwha Ocean, Samsung Heavy Industries and HD Hyundai’s yards build the bulk of the world’s membrane-tank carriers, and the group companies also supply the two-stroke dual-fuel engines that power them under licence.
China has moved from a marginal position to a substantial one. Hudong-Zhonghua, part of CSSC, is the established builder, producing 174,000 cubic metre vessels of its own X-DF series, and has been expanding capacity with new facilities. Its order book runs deep into the next decade.
Japan built much of the early fleet, particularly Moss spherical vessels, and retains capability though at lower volume than at its peak.
Russia has developed a yard to build ice-class tonnage for its Arctic projects, driven by the difficulty of ordering such ships abroad.
Everyone else has effectively left. European and American yards built LNG carriers in earlier eras and no longer compete for them.
Why the list is short
The barrier is not steel. Yards that can build a large container ship can handle the hull. The barrier is the cargo containment system.
A membrane tank is a barrier about a millimetre thick that has to remain leak-tight for decades across hundreds of thermal cycles, installed inside a hull, in confined spaces, to tolerances that do not forgive improvisation. It involves hundreds of thousands of welds, specialised training, licensor qualification and dedicated facilities. A yard cannot decide to enter the market and deliver a good ship two years later; the learning curve is long and expensive, and early ships from a new entrant carry real risk.
Free-standing tanks are a different discipline but no easier: large aluminium spheres or prismatic tanks are their own fabrication speciality.
On top of that sits scheduling. A yard’s LNG berths are a fixed resource. When ordering surges, the queue extends, and a project needing ships in three years may find the slots gone. That queue is as real a constraint on LNG supply growth as the liquefaction plant itself, and it is not visible in any capacity statistic.
What the yard does not make
A carrier is an assembly of specialised systems, and the yard buys most of them.
The containment system is licensed. GTT’s Mark III and NO96 families cover most of the fleet, with KC-1 from KC LNG Tech as the Korean alternative. The yard installs under licence and pays a royalty.
The engines are licensed designs. MAN’s ME-GI and ME-GA and WinGD’s X-DF are built by the Korean and Chinese engine builders under agreement with the designers.
The cargo machinery comes from a separate set of specialists: submerged motor pumps from Nikkiso and others, boil-off compressors from Cryostar, reliquefaction from Wärtsilä or Air Liquide.
The materials come from a narrow group too. Invar for NO96 membranes comes from Aperam, and the cryogenic steels for tanks come from a small number of mills, with POSCO’s high-manganese steel now offered as an alternative to nickel steel.
So the concentration is not only in the yards. It repeats at every layer of the ship, which is why our carriers hub lists suppliers alongside builders, each with a public source.
Reading yard data
Yards change names. Daewoo Shipbuilding became Hanwha Ocean; Hyundai’s group structure has been reorganised more than once. A tracker records whatever name was current when a vessel was built, so the same yard appears under several labels across a fleet list.
We fold those names together using a hand-maintained alias file, so a yard’s page shows its whole record rather than fragments. The original name stays visible on the vessel page. The same mechanism handles owners, which change even more often than builders.
Our fleet directory lets you filter by yard, and each company page shows every tracked vessel that yard built, alongside any terminals or pipelines the same group owns.