Cargo Heating Management - Green Initiative

A typical Suez max may consume as much as 500MT fuel oil in cargo heating for maintaining cargo temperatures of Boscan crude in a voyage from Venezuela to far-east. A 50% reduction in this consumption through estimation planning and monitoring of cargo heating may mean a lot to any tanker operator/owner.  This reduction in fuel oil consumption is certainly big for a seemingly small cargo heating operation.

“Blue Water Trade Winds Pvt. Ltd. , a pioneer in the innovative service of Cargo Heating Management, touched the milestone of 58000 MT fuel saving since its inception in 2008, corresponding to approximately 35 million USD. ”

It is not many years ago that fuel efficiency was a neglected topic of many marine conferences and journals. But today sustainable technologies and concept rank on top of the agenda of maritime industry. What made such a dramatic change in awareness in this area?

The answer may be complex and the causes are numerous. But above all, it is clearly

the result of phenomenal rise in fuel cost. This significantly reduced the voyage earnings for those ship operators who lacked the ability to adopt newer cost effective measures.

Also the foresighted ship owners have now realised the need for their contribution towards reducing harmful emissions by cutting down on avoidable fuel consumption.

As the world's most reliable, cost-effective and energy-efficient mass transportation methods, maritime transportation is central to sustainable development. There is a growing international movement to protect our beautiful oceans in the marine freight industry.

Taking a step ahead

Blue Water focuses on maritime energy efficiency areas, harnessing the experience of its professionals from diverse industries. These services are milestone addition to the upcoming ways of saving fossil fuels and reducing environmental impact from emissions; primarily by innovating new methodologies to optimize the fuel consumption across diverse operations including cargo heating.

With a line- up of several oil majors and leading tanker owners as esteemed clients today, Blue Water has come a long way in its endeavor for shaping one-of-its-kind energy efficiency project that created an effective cost cutting platform. In addition, this service was able to provide much needed support for giving insight into operations, green policies and core business processes.

The company is now focusing on pushing the need for next-generation sea transport sustainability objects to tanker shipping companies— a headway towards extending fuel saving objectives to higher level such as carbon budgets, environmental impact gauging, and energy efficiency metrics.

It is often said that what gets measured, gets done. Although shipping companies set ambitious energy optimization initiatives but given the multitude and complexity of variables involved, accurately measuring and tracking such performance remains a major challenge.

When it comes to getting energy efficiency done, shipping companies can choose different ways to measure and assess their energy use. Blue Water has recently developed a simple yet effective and unique mechanism to specifically address this challenge. The Cargo Heating Performance Indicator (CHPI) is developed by a group of research scholars from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) through regression analysis and in-depth statistical study of over 1400 heated cargo voyages, managed by Blue Water. The CHPI has now enabled operators to track and compare cargo heating performance of heating cargo voyages in any given condition. In other words, the system now allows logical comparison of an apple to a mango. This is done by obtaining an empirical relation between fuel oil consumption and factors affecting it.

The end result – in the form of Fuel Oil consumption Metric Tons per day signifies cargo heating efficiency of any given voyage.