Question about ship fuel
Had a question from a listener about ship fuel (this question ended up a little bit buried in the other blog messages so I thought I’d put it upfront here so it would be easy to see):
“i am curious about ships and refueling, fuel treatment onboard (heating, fuel viscousity etc)? do ships have enough fuel on board for a round trip or just one way? how do they refuel? does a barge come out or does the ship pull up? also how do they start those big engines? do they just turn a key and crank it over like a small boat or is there a process? thanks boomer”
I’ll check into this and post comments asap, and will discuss Friday on the Ship Report.
- Joanne
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Ships will take on fuel at a dock or at anchor from a barge generally.The ships I have worked on, it seems, buy fuel for one way plus a set reserve.The chief engineer,captain and the company make these decisions based on the rapidly changing market. Fuel is heavy and increases the draft of the vessel and alot of ports have draft restrictions, so the chief mate will make a load plan before heading to such load ports and included will be the max tons of fuel aboard to still be able to take on all cargo.
As far as starting the engine, I am not an engineer, so I’m sure there is more to it than what I will explain. I work on deisel ships and deisel is fired by compression not spark, what they use is air pressure, in the engine room there are large air compressors that will force the engine pistons to move thus compressing the deisel and causing the exlosion that moves the pistons, the engine can be started locally in the engine room or from the navigation bridge.
Like I said I am not an engineer so I am sure there is much more to the process, but I believe this is the basics of what it takes to get the engine running.
~B
Thanks, Bert, for your comments. What you said about how ship engines are started matches information I’ve learned in interviews with other mariners for the Ship Report. It all adds up to the fact that starting a ship engine is not a fast process – much more time consuming and complex than starting a car, for instance. Another example of how things at sea require planning and specialized knowledge in most cases.
- Joanne