Preparing for the fuels of the future

There are few executives with Walker’s breadth of marine experience, which includes 15 years at sea and four years as superintendent onshore with Mobil Shipping, as well as (after Mobil’s acquisition by Exxon) senior roles in both the marine fuels and lubricants divisions. So it is with the pragmatism of a veteran that he points to a troubling confluence of factors facing the industry today – among them a shortfall in marine training, an unprecedented pace of change in the sector and huge uncertainty over the future direction of ship propulsion.

To those daunting challenges, Walker and ExxonMobil are now committing considerable resources; focusing on research, close relationships with engine manufacturers and strong support for partners like never before. In a wide-ranging interview, Walker outlines how the leading marine fuel and lubricant company is preparing for whatever future lies ahead.

The Motorship: Let’s start with the big picture. What is your perspective of the industry as it stands today?

Steve Walker: We’re entering a different era. The shipping industry may traditionally have been quite sleepy, evolving in small increments. It is now in an age of evolution in legislative requirements which demand change at a much more rapid pace. That’s our real challenge – being able to deal with that change and come up with the solutions that can help our customers.

The shipping industry is on the verge of a whole raft of new legislation, and we’ve seen the first impact with IMO Tier II NOx regulations. That brought the development of new engine designs which reared the issue of cold corrosion again. It has been a wake-up call; we know that we have to stay at the apex of engine development so that we see the changes that are happening and are ready for the lubricant needs of the future.

Which of those legislative changes do you believe will have the biggest impact on the business?

The biggest one for me is the Energy Efficient Design Index (EEDI) and how that ramps up over time. Implemented already its full impact will be in place by 2025, but will there be a call for another percentage reduction [in CO2 emissions] in 2030? That would really start to challenge the viability of fuel oil use in engines. Tier III NOx limits [effective from 1 January 2016] give a fuel efficiency penalty as well as a CO2 penalty, and having to meet ever more stringent CO2 improvements could mean there will either be some very slow, underpowered ships, or widespread use of alternative fuels that offer CO2 reductions.

Knowing what the fuel decisions of shipowners will be is one of our biggest challenges. No doubt it will be a commercial decision as to what technology they use come 2020 or 2025 [when the introduction of the global 0.50% fuel sulphur limit is planned]. Some of that has been muddied by the recent oil price changes. What would the spread be on distillate versus gas prices, and will the gas infrastructure be there? In 20-40 years we could be seeing the start of a predominant fuel change for shipping.

Will the fuel oil engine that we’ve known for so many years still work with all this emission equipment on it? And will it still be able to meet the CO2 challenges in front of us? We talked recently with major engine manufacturers about the future of the fuel oil engine. If you look at the current fuel efficiency of engines versus the ideal Carnot cycle, they are very close. You won’t find an extra 20-25% efficiency, more like 4-5%. So there is very little room to for extra efficiency from the engine itself.

I think we’ll see engine pressures continue to go up and with it the challenge of pulling cold corrosion back to reasonable levels. Engine bore to stroke ratios will continue to rise and the stroke will be much longer in future, because ships can get efficiencies by having much slower turning propellers. It is critical to stay ahead of these changes and understand what they mean for lubricants. We’ve always had a strong link with OEMs and we want to see some of the design changes and modifications as soon as possible..

We have a couple of projects that come to fruition towards the end of the year that should give us an advantage in seeing how new engine designs will work. You’re already a stage too late when the engine swims – it would be much better to understand that engine’s needs before it goes into service. We are working on ways of modelling data that will give us a better read on what those needs will be.

What does the prospect of longer stroke engines mean for cylinder oils? Will cold corrosion remain a problem?

Hopefully the cold corrosion issue will be offset by new designs around piston heights, for example, to keep the engines at a similar pressure level to today. If engines become more corrosive, we would be looking at another increase in the base number of cylinder oil – particularly while we stay with heavy fuel oil.

One area that designers have been looking at is to move back to a high topland design – centring the piston so that its top is sticking out of the liner. That means the combustion chamber is quite high up and the cylinder cover is longer. So by the time the running surface of the liner is exposed to the gas in the cylinder, lower pressure means it will already be below the dew point of sulphuric acid. That is one design countermeasure being considered and we are interested to see how that works out as it goes into service.

It seems as though lubricants in the future will have to accommodate a wider variety of fuels and engine types. What does that mean for product development?

The days where an engine could take a fairly broad specification of lubricant are ending as engines become more sensitive. If you look at the automotive market, there is a lot of complexity in lubricants that has come about as engines have evolved in line with emissions regulations. But in the marine industry we still have a very simple specification – SAE 50 and whatever base number, plus the OEMs talk about good detergency. You field test for 4,000 hours, and if the engine looks OK at the end you get a no objection letter. We can see a scenario in the next 20 years whereby the engine has had to evolve to a point at which, in order to stop you breaching material limits, you need oils that are far more sophisticated than they are today.

Fuel economy and viscosity have not really been explored on large ships, for example. Viscosity grades are coming down in the automobile market to reduce internal drag on the engine, making it more efficient. Conversely the payback on higher viscosity is thicker oil film and less engine wear. But sophisticated additives can increase protection at lower viscosity.

We have done great work on US rivers with high-speed engines, We’ve been able to switch several owners away from using traditional oil which the OEM requires to be changed every 500 hours. We’ve moved them to synthetic oil and had engines at 5,000 hours between drains. So the sump might be changed once every 10 months instead of once a month.

The oil is more expensive, but the cost benefit for the owner is significant. It cuts time out of service and maintenance costs and brings all the safety benefits of a well maintained engine. So many positive aspects and cost benefits to the owner and it’s all down to having a high performance lubricant.

Sophisticated additives can mean added toxicity. How is Exxon Mobil working to make its products more environmentally friendly?

There are a couple of areas. First, optimising cylinder oil consumption as low as possible while maintaining good engine condition is the right thing environmentally. We’ve also worked a lot on Vessel General Permit compliant lubricants over the past two years. These lubricants are very high-performing environmentally acceptable lubricants.

Exxon Mobil, like some other lubricant companies, has developed its own cylinder condition monitoring programme. How successful has that programme been so far in saving ship owners money?

We have a good database of improvements whereby we’ve saved customers money by reducing oil consumption or conversely, the engine was in distress and wearing badly, so we’ve increased consumption but avoided significant maintenance costs.

I believe our Cylinder Condition Monitoring programme we have built is the best in the industry. We can provide the owner with equipment to give immediate results onboard for total base number and total iron, and that information is sent by email back to our office and gets processed in about 72 hours.

Most programmes we see are lab-based, and it can take a month before you get results. With some corrosive engines you can get almost a millimetre of liner wear in 1,000 hours. That means potentially half a millimetre of liner wear before you get the results back. So having a programme in place with that speed of results, offering very concise information and advice, is very advantageous.

How willing have ship owners been to take that advice?

Most of the time very willing. It’s part of an educational role that also extends to companies actually building the engines, in Asia for example. That’s something we’ve started to work actively on this year, putting a plan together to visit all the major builders in Asia and adding some local resource to facilitate those relationships.

That also encompasses educating people new to the industry, and in the engine building group we’ve started to pass on knowledge. There is an ageing demographic to the industry; there are a lot of experienced people, but how do you pass that knowledge on?

We do see a training gap. We’ve seen it with customers who tell us that their sea staff are not able to handle some of our programmes that we’ve got that can help them. So there’s an educational role for us in helping companies as they go through this very rapid change process.

We have a duty both within ExxonMobil and to our customers and business partners to provide that level of knowledge and education. Over the past several years we have actively been bring new people in to our marine business, with a view to them being a marine resource in the long term, actively backfilling any potential longer term knowledge and resource gaps.

This approach will enable to continue delivering products that give the performance we promise. The whole reason we have research facilities around the world and why we’re investing further in research and education programmes, is to make sure we have products that perform at the highest level providing our customers with the performance we promise.