In March 2018, almost 100 ships presented operational problems using residual fuels bunkered in Houston. The International Council of Combustion Engines (CIMAC) reviewed the reported cases and concluded that until now there is no explanation regarding the root cause of the mentioned incidents.
Namely, the ships reported sticking engine fuel pumps, while a number of vessels also reported separator sludging and filter blocking.
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Around 100 ships reported problems consuming the fuel received during a 9 week period starting in March. In some cases, the vessels were left without propulsion and electrical power.
In addition, scattered reports of fuel sludging followed, along with owners wanting to debunker products they had lifted in Panama and Singapore for fear the Houston problem had spread there.
CIMAC analyzed the cases which showed that the incidences were not isolated to any specific machinery, component make or brand of affected separators, filters, two-stroke engines and four-stroke engines.
What is more, the investigations indicated that not all of these fuels had the same fingerprint parameters and most of the ships bunkering in the affected ports during this period did not report any issues despite having received fuels which had came from the same source.
Based on these results, CIMAC could not find a concrete conclusion as to what specifically may have caused these incidents.
In fact, there are no consistent findings across the number of fuels tested that can be used to separate problematic fuels from non-problematic fuels.
It has not been possible to confidently conclude if the blending process had gone wrong in some way or how any of the unexpected chemical species had made its way (deliberately or accidentally) into the fuel oil.
