Assalamualaikum, and welcome back to Orange Shots.
today I bring you another interesting video.
This video is about how ships get fueled
how a vessel takes fuel,
how a ship works,
and where it can get refuelled.
Well, the answer to all of those questions are in today's video.
So, let's start.
This place you see behind me is, again,
the city of Singapore or the country of Singapore.
The country and city both have the same name.
This place, Singapore, is considered the darling
for bunkering vessels.
Now, what is bunkering?
You get your car fueled, you must get your generators fueled, too
if you have one.
So when you add more fuel to appliances, that's called refuelling.
Our language in the merchant navy is a bit different.
This same process is called bunkering in our language,
i.e., a vessel is bunkering.
Bunkering simply means
refilling the oil needed for a ship to function.
Now, one important thing to note over here is
a ship uses 2-3 different types of fuel.
One is called MG, or Marine Gas Oil,
which is always a diesel oil.
Another one is called MD, or Marine Diesel Oil,
which is obviously diesel oil.
There's HFO, which isn't allowed to be used anymore.
Then we have VLSF, which is called Very Low Sulphur Fuel Oil.
This is so we don't pollute the air around us.
All of these different fuels are used in different machinery in a ship.
at different times.
But, to keep the video simple,
and to make it easier to understand,
let's forget about everything only stick to fuel oil burning in a ship.
Let's not talk about the types of oils.
I've told you in my previous videos that ships use a lot of fuel.
If we talk about the size of the ship I'm on,
We use approximately 60 tonnes per day.
This isn't accurate, just a rough estimation.
Bigger ships use more than this
I've even sailed on one using 89 tonnes per day.
I'm not talking about liters here, I'm talking about tonnes.
So, with a ship using so much fuel,
since it has to travel to many regions like Europe, China,
the US. Some voyages are very long.
So, you need enough fuel everytime to go on to the next voyage easily.
The first thing I must tell you is that we never completely fuel our vessels.
Okay. Done blasting your horn?
It's done bunkering.
We only keep the bunkering oil we need, and we don't maximise it because
a ship can't reduce its cargo carrying capacity.
If it ends up carrying too much fuel,
it wouldn't be able to carry as much cargo.
So we carry the amount we need keeping in mind our next voyage,
also keeping in mind that we might find another bunker on the way.
This is what we keep in mind when storing fuel oil.
I'll come to this point later; about where we get out bunker oil.
So, what we usually do is that
the schematics are very simple.
We calculate the cargo we need to load, how long our next voyage is,
the time it will take for us to get back.
We keep all these factors in mind.
You can ask the question that: Zahid why, why does it happen that way.
Why would a ship go to a certain place, get oil, and then come back.
Isn't is easily accessible? No.
We do get fuel from almost everywhere.
So, it's not about where or not we get fuel.
Now, what did I tell you earlier?
A ship uses at least 60 tonnes of oil.
For that we need at least 2500 to 3000 tonnes of oil stored.
So, imagine this scenario,
if you happened to buy a lot of fuel from one area,
2500-3000 tonnes mean thousands of dollars.
No shipowner would be ready to spend such an amount for no reason
Emegencies are a completely different case.
In some regions in the world, fuel comes cheaper;
compared to the rest of the world.
Some places we've marked for this purpose are:
Singapore, Taiwan, Fujairah (UAE).
Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, Novorossiysk (Russia)
and Panama.
A maximum of these regions are duty free.
They don't charge a lot of taxes.
Fuel oil is bound to be cheaper there.
If the money you have to pay for a tonne is expensive in one region
you're obviously going to end up somewhere else.
That pretty much brings us to the next point:
how the bunkering is done.
Well, there are two ways to bunker,
if you can see the bunker barges I'm showing here,
these barges are small ships
and all they do is, for example if we're in Singapore,
these are only confined to Singapore. They don't go far.
These barges carry around 2500, 3000, 5000 or 8000 tonnes of oil.
We order that fuel beforehand. We tell our office to order them.
Our office orders them and they come alongside us
like you see the vessels here.
They send a pipe over to our vessel,
our vessel has fixed piping where
the oil is transferred and stored into our bunker tank.
It's as simple as that.
The second method: some ports around the world,
take Novorossiysk for example,
you can get it in Karachi too,
not Mumbai though.
It's accessible in Singapore.
I mean it varies from terminal to terminal, port to port.
In some ports, if berthing is taking place,
and if cargo is being loaded or discharged,
bunkering is also possible,
since the terminal (jetty) already has a fixed pipeline attached.
Hoses are connected to the pipeline,
you order the amount of fuel you need-
The ship's very close. What's he doing?
This is the problem with Singapore
the traffic is so congested here.
Look at the size of that ship and where it's passing through.
We did the same thing, however.
What do we do, there too many ships in this world now. Not enough room.
Especially Singapore, Fujairah, Gibraltar,
Panama; these areas are very congested.
Coming back to the point;
some berths already have fixed pipelines.
Hoses are connected to those pipelines,
and you take the amount of fuel you've ordered.
Then the same fuel is used in the ship's boilers,
the ship's generators, the main engine.
And this is how it works on all ships.
So, this is basically how we do it.
We order fuel beforehand.
then we store the fuel in our ship
and then we start using it.
This is how different ships in different parts of the world operate.
Some of them take gas oil, some take VLSFO,
some, HSFO.
However, their case is related to scrubbers, that's another story.
And that's how, in a nutshell, ships are bunkered from different regions.
This process is called bunkering.
So, I'm sure you enjoyed today's video.
You found out how such large ships carry out the bunkering process,
called refuelling in layman terms.
One more thing I'd like to tell you:
if we ever really need oil, I'm not talking about normal circumstances
I'm talking about the extreme ones. We've done it once.
If there's ever a dire need for oil, and there's
another ship available and it's the same company as ours,
it's possible to bunker from that ship.
But then that would be an STS operation, and that would be a long story.
I think its much easier and cheaper to order from the shore,
asking the barges to transport bunker to us and be on their way.
That's how vessels run all around the world.
If you enjoyed this video, please
don't forget to like, share, and subscribe.
With tons of love to my Orange family
and to-be Orange family.
Take very good care of yourselves.
Remember me in your prayers.
Stay happy, stay well. Stay safe.
This is Orange Shots, I'm Zahid Nisar.
ALLAH Hafiz.