The Port of Long Beach announced a new tool that can measure the actual motion of ships to determine whether they can safely navigate the Long Beach channel, allowing tankers to arrive with deeper drafts and heavier loads. As explained, although the channel is 76 feet deep, there has been no way so far to predict how close a ship could come to touching the bottom.
As a result, huge oil tankers call at the Port of Long Beach regularly, but never with a full load. These massive vessels carrying up to 2.5 million barrels of crude are partially unloaded offshore before coming through the Port’s Main Channel to dock at Tesoro’s deep-draft terminal at Berth 121.
The system introduced consists of an instrument — called an “octopus” — that pilots put on ships to measure movement. There are also three local and three offshore buoys with technology that measure wave motion, direction and height. All this information is entered into a computer that synthesizes the data to predict a ship’s roll, pitch and under-keel clearance.
Being able to bring these supertankers to dock means less pollution, less congestion and better use of port infrastructure, said Captain Rob McCaughey, Manager of Marine Operations at Tesoro. The octopus technology could also be used on container ships, drilling, and in the industry as a whole, Capt. McCaughey said.
“This is ultimately going to reduce the risk of transferring oil on the West Coast,” he said. “Every VLCC [very large crude carrier] that we can bring in fully loaded, it’s four or five ships that are removed from the water and not emitting emissions in the atmosphere. So it’s huge.”
The idea for a pilot program began in 2012, not long after Tesoro took over BP’s assets at the Port of Long Beach. The Port of Long Beach and the state agreed to share the cost of a $50,000 study into Protide, and Tesoro proceeded with the program in 2014.
Before a ship comes through the channel, Tesoro and the pilots go through the Protide results. Then they board the ship and hitch the octopus to a laptop on the bridge. Once the ship’s motion is recorded, the pilots take that information back to the pilot’s station, plug the data into the Protide computer and superimpose the actual results onto the predictive information to see what the ship actually did versus what it predicted the ship would do.
The plan to expand the draft limit is being implemented in four phases, with each phase taking ships a foot deeper than before. In the final phase, a VLCC would be able to pass at 69 feet, the deepest draft a ship at which can be brought in by regulation.
However, there’s no desire to rush the process. In fact, additional safety measures have been added to hedge their bets. For example, if the program predicts 2 feet of keel clearance with all the motion, Tesoro and Jacobsen set a “hard deck” or clearance of 3 feet. If the program predicts that the ship’s going to get within 3 feet of the bottom, clearance needs to be greater than 3 feet, McCaughey said.
If pilots don’t feel comfortable bringing in a VLCC through the channel, they will wait for more favorable conditions.
“We believe that this first-of-a-kind capability in a United States port will leverage emerging technologies to better protect our sensitive coastal environment, by reducing the number of offshore oil transfers from supertankers to smaller ‘lightering’ vessels,” said Thomas Cullen, Jr., administrator for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
