The environmental impact of ferries and cruise ships has been in the spotlight for a lot longer than cargo ships, given that they are a public-facing sector of the industry under the eye of increasingly environmentally conscious customers. When at berth in port cities and towns, exhaust smoke rising from ferry and cruise ship funnels is highly visible to the general public. Since the connection between ship fumes and their negative impact on local air quality and population health has been scientifically acknowledged, the pressure on ferry and cruise operators to minimize emissions to air from their ships when in port areas has also increased considerably and continues to do so each year.

In 2017, a study of the emissions in the Baltic Sea area, conducted by the Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission of HELCOM, discovered that RoPax vessels have the largest GHG emission reduction potential. However, the research also revealed that in this sector the trend was going in the wrong direction. Although RoPax vessels had the highest per unit emission at 132 grams per ton-kilometer and their emissions continued to rise during the study period, even though traffic had declined by 11% from the previous year.

Fast forward three years and RoPax operators have begun to reap the benefits from several different initiatives taken to reduce emissions. An increasing number of newbuildings are now equipped with plug and play shore power connection equipment that allow them to plug into the local power grid when at berth in port, switching auxiliary power demands to using electricity rather than diesel fuel reduces air pollution significantly.

Wind-assisted propulsion technology is also becoming a viable option and new alternative fuels such as hydrogen, methanol and biofuels are being tested with vigor.

Passenger ship operators also continue to make great strides in mitigating the environmental impact of their ships. Investments in exhaust gas cleaning system (EGCS) technology, optimized hull designs coupled with antifouling coatings that make use of advanced technologies such as Selektope® are helping the sector to really clean up its act.

Lean Marine has played a central role in the passenger ships green revolution in recent years and continues to do so, through the provision of our automated propulsion optimization system FuelOpt™.

FuelOpt™, achieves real time fuel savings by controlling the vessel’s propulsion and making sure that the propulsive power is optimized automatically based on the command set on power or fuel consumption and/or speed from the bridge. This removes costly variations in speed and power caused by human operational factors, allowing the vessel to achieve optimal fuel consumption at every given point throughout a voyage.

For vessels with controllable pitch propellers, FuelOpt™ acts as a dynamic tuning system for the propulsion machinery to assure engine and propeller operate at optimal conditions.

In 2019, twenty RoPax vessels had FuelOpt™ installed onboard. These ships are now equipped with the tools the crew need to optimize their propulsion line in real-time in order to get the highest performance out of each and every gram of fuel burnt by the vessel, while achieving better control of voyage schedules, stronger financials and environmental sustainability.

This is particularly true for ColorLine, a company that entrusted Lean Marine with enhancing the propulsion system of the two largest RoPax vessels in the world: Color Magic and Color Fantasy.

Recently, we also got the opportunity to equip Viking Lines’ RoPax vessel Viking Gabriella, as well as support Stena Line with their Stena Fuel Pilot, an Artificial Intelligence project where FuelOpt™ operates as part of a much larger project including advance route planning, weather forecasting and big data. Our customer base extends far outside of Scandinavia, an installation on board one of Bohai Ferries’ vessels took our technology to China and beyond.  

While FuelOpt™ is suited for all vessel types and any type of conventional propulsion system, it is particularly efficient for RoPax and cruise vessels due to their operational requirements.

With a FuelOpt™ control panel on the bridge, a ship’s master is able to directly control speed and consumption. With the speed input function, the master can ensure that the vessel will reach the next port on time, a factor that is very critical for a liner service or for a cruise ship. With the consumption input, the master gets the opportunity to limit the consumption in order to automatically avoid very costly overconsumption due to adverse weather, shallow waters, hull fouling, off-design losses, for example.

Additionally, FuelOpt™ is a very social system which can be integrated as an ‘on top’ propulsion automation system in the current chain of tools and processes already existing on board, meaning that FuelOpt™ can take inputs from a weather routing system, route optimizing tool, AI system and more. Our technology is also completely independent of the fuel type or energy source and works well with both conventional engines and newer engine designs.

FuelOpt™ creates and gathers vast volumes of vessel data which is sent to our smart cloud-based performance monitoring software Fleet Analytics™. For passenger ship operators wanting to digitalize vessel or fleet performance data, FuelOpt™ does this already for you without need of another expensive data gathering system installation. Fleet Analytics™ makes Big Data exploitation less intimidating by putting the data into a meaningful context and presenting it in an organized and user-friendly fashion. It’s a win-win technology: automatically lowered fuel consumption and enabling digitalization in one system. Combining these two solutions allows ship owners to reach the full optimization potential of their fleet.

With this insight, new knowledge, our customers are empowered to make efficiency a continuous improvement cycle with smooth long-lasting impactful operational changes towards healthy and sustainable operations.

Author: Sarah Zitouni