Woodside & EDL — 55kL Supervacuum LNG Road Tankers

The problem

Woodside and EDL operate LNG road transport on some of the harshest routes in the world — long corrugated hauls through the Pilbara, in heat, dust and vibration that punish equipment well beyond what most imported trailers are designed to endure. Their existing fleet was suffering two chronic failure modes.

The first was insulation. Conventional trailers use perlite, a granular insulating powder packed between the inner and outer vessels. Under the constant vibration of road transport, perlite settles. As it settles, the upper surface of the inner vessel is left progressively less insulated, so boil-off climbs and hold time falls over the life of the trailer — a slow, irreversible decline in performance that no amount of maintenance can recover.

The second was running gear. Suspension and running gear engineered for sealed European or Asian highways was failing repeatedly on Australian outback roads, taking trailers out of service and disrupting scheduled gas deliveries to remote operations.

The engineering

AMG approached the two failure modes as one design brief: build an LNG semi-trailer for Australian conditions rather than adapting one built for somewhere else.

In place of perlite, AMG engineered a double-wall, ultra-vacuum insulation system. With no granular fill to settle, the insulation performance the trailer leaves the factory with is the performance it keeps — eliminating the settlement failure mode entirely rather than managing it. Boil-off stays low and hold time stays long across the service life of the unit.

For the chassis, AMG developed Australian-designed and fabricated running gear and suspension, engineered specifically for corrugated unsealed roads and sustained remote operation. At 55kL, the trailers deliver optimum payload within Australian regulatory and safety limits, and comply with AS 2809 and the ADG Code, with pressure vessels built to ASME.

Specifications

Woodside & EDL fleet — as delivered

Capacity	55kL LNG semi-trailer
Insulation	Double-wall ultra-vacuum — no perlite settlement
Running gear	Australian-designed and built, for corrugated outback roads
Payload	Optimised within Australian regulatory limits
Unloading	Integrated, near-seamless unloading
Compliance	ASME · AS 2809 · ADG Code

The outcome

The new fleet eliminated both failure modes. Repeat orders followed from Woodside and EDL, and the design has since been refined into what is now the benchmark 55kL LNG semi-trailer in the Australian market — the same platform AMG has gone on to deliver, in LNG and LPG configurations, for operators including Clean Energy Fuels Australia and Supagas.

For the operators, the practical result is a virtual pipeline they can schedule around: predictable hold times, trailers that stay on the road, and gas that arrives at remote power stations when it is supposed to.