AET Tankers, Petroleum and Chemical tanker owner, announced that its first LNG dual-fuel sister Aframaxes undertook their maiden ship-to-ship LNG bunkering in April. The company’s vessels, Eagle Brasilia and Eagle Bintulu, conducted bunkering operations in Port of Rotterdam.
The bunker sales in the Panama Canal decreased by 20.1% in comparison to the same period last year. Specifically, an overall of 723.894 metric tonnes of marine fuel was sold, on the contrary to the 905.444 mt that was sold in 2018.
The joint venture between Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd and Shell Eastern Petroleum highlighted the completion of its 100th LNG bunkering operation at the Port of Singapore. According to FueLNG, these operations have occurred with no loss-time incidents and in accordance with the Technical reference (TR) 56 standard for LNG bunkering in Singapore.
The previous week, the port of Gothenburg launched a digital application to make bunkering operations at the port easier and more efficient. The ‘bunkering app’ is one of the first in the world to offer this range of functionality.
An accident during a bunkering operation aboard the Panama-flagged container ship, MSC Sandra, led to a significant oil spill. According to estimations, three tonnes of marine fuel were spilled during a bunkering operation involving the Bahia III barge and the MSC Sandra containership in the Portuguese port on Friday, 5 April.
During his presentation at the last GREEN4SEA Conference, Mr. Bill Stamatopoulos, VeriFuel’s Business Development Manager for South Europe, discussed the possible challenges that the shipping industry will face regarding the 2020 compliant fuels regulation. Mr. Stamatopoulos explained that the supply chain must cooperate and improve transparency in the bunker sector when the 2020 sulphur cap regulation comes into force.
Two companies filled lawsuits in federal courts in Texas reporting that ships they operated in 2018 were damaged by contaminated bunker fuel sold by a Valero Energy Co subsidiary Valero Marketing and Supply Co, as Reuters reports.
The world’s largest supply vessel for LNG, named Kairos, conducted the first LNG bunker supply operation for the newbuild ferry MS Visborg at the ferry pier of the port of Visby. The bunker operation was signed by Nauticor and Destination Gotland in December 2017 and enables the ferry to run its service on LNG while connecting the Swedish mainland with the island of Gotland.
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is considered as an alternative fuel for shipping and a technically feasible option for compliance with the MARPOL annex VI revised requirements of 2020. Nowadays more than 200 LNG powered carriers operate worldwide, while there are also several LNG carriers with dual mode engines which can operate with both fuel oil and LNG.
Singapore is one of the top bunkering ports in the world, providing high quality services which meet the requirements of the large number of vessels it serves daily; however, there are some challenging issues that operators should be aware of when it comes to bunkering, derived from frequent incidents which occurred in the past.
