Micro Motion Manual: Marine Lower Fuel Consumption to Improve Margins | Micro Motion Manuals & Guides

Micro Motion® Measurement Solutions for Marine Fuel Consumption

MARINE FUEL CONSUMPTION

Operate with greater precision

“I’m concerned about decreasing margins.”

How are you balancing rising costs and falling freight rates?

Fuel costs have increased

about 300% in the last

five years. There is every

expectation that marine

bunker prices will return to

peak levels.

www.shippingandco2.org/industrymeasures.htm

Industry Measures, International
Chamber of Shipping

Market volatility and rising fuel costs are increasing your largest operating expense and making it

difficult for you to plan for the future. Because fuel cost accounts for 50-60% of the operating costs

of a vessel, it is one of the most influential factors in your organization’s profitability.

At the same time, the marketplace has been inundated with an excess volume of vessels—some

even as a result of state-funded subsidies. This overcapacity and increased competition has collided

with slow economic growth and resulted in reduced carry demand and lower global box rates.

This combination of rising costs and lower box rates is rapidly squeezing margins and threatening

profitability. While you can’t control the cost of your largest operating expense, you can control

how much fuel you use. You must do everything you can to minimize this expense to protect your

margins.

What if...

• When it comes to fuel
consumption measurements,
your meters alerted you if
something was wrong?

• Before you purchased fuel
for your next voyage, you
knew exactly what you
consumed on your last trip?

• When you implemented
a new energy-savings
technology, you knew exactly
the impact it made to your
overall fuel consumption?

Fleet managers we talk to tell us about challenges like these:

“We’re not as operationally efficient as we could be.”

With fuel costs rising and margins shrinking, you must do everything you can to reduce your fuel

consumption. But all too often, your crew is consumed with maintenance and day-to-day tasks so

they can’t focus on higher-value initiatives. There never seems to be enough time to dedicate to your

trim and other programs that make meaningful improvements in your fuel consumption. If you don’t

free up your crew from time-consuming maintenance tasks, you’ll fail to make progress toward your

fuel efficiency goals and fall behind the pace of increasing costs.

“I may have unnecessary costs due to fuel inventory losses.”

It’s not something anyone likes to talk about, but fuel inventory loss is a real problem. For the same

reason you want to conserve fuel (high prices), there are people who want to profit from selling it.

Without the appropriate installation of meters and accurate measurement of consumption, it’s very

difficult for you to know if you’re experiencing needless inventory loss.

Micro Motion® Measurement Solutions for Marine Fuel Consumption

MARINE FUEL CONSUMPTION

Market pressures beyond your control are
eroding your margins. To ensure profitability,
you must systematically attack waste and
inefficiencies.

By partnering with Emerson, you’ll be
able to precisely measure your largest
operating cost, as well as improve your
operational efficiencies with automation
and virtually maintenance-free equipment.

AUTOMATE INFORMATION

Manual processes keep your crew from focusing on higher-value initiatives like improving fuel
usage. With Emerson, you’ll be able to quickly identify areas of improvement with real-time
consumption data delivered directly to the bridge. That means your crew will see a visualization
of changes in your consumption without having to send a body down to the engine room. And
because you’ll have accurate kinematic viscosity, you won’t have to use look-up tables or deal with
time-consuming, error-prone, manual conversions. By easily monitoring and managing fuel usage,
you’ll improve both your accuracy as well as your operational efficiency.

GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR, BURN WHAT YOU BUY

Because fuel consumption naturally varies by voyage, there’s no way for you to know how much
fuel you saved on a particular trip and whether it stayed on board for the next. With Emerson’s
accurate measurements and full traceability, you’ll always know exactly how much fuel was
consumed compared to your plan, how much is leftover at the end of each voyage, and you’ll
identify inventory problems right away to prevent loss. And because you’ll be measuring direct
mass, you won’t have to calculate conversions or make assumptions, so you know your
measurements are completely accurate.

Operate with greater precision

Transatlantic had very

little visibility into their

true fuel consumption

rates. After installing our

meters, everyone –

including management

was surprised to learn

how much they were really

burning. This awareness

alone resulted in behavior

changes that had an

immediate and positive

impact on consumption. The

result was that they reduced

fuel costs by two percent per

vessel and saw a payback on

their investment in less than

two months.

INSTALL AND MEASURE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME

Incorrect equipment installations and data inaccuracies waste crew time and distract them from
more important duties. With Emerson’s dedicated global marine services, you’ll adopt your new
technology quickly without burdening your crew. By performing surveys, you’ll eliminate errors and
reduce installation costs. With Emerson’s support, you’ll bring your engineers on board with this
change so you can implement your new technology quickly and effectively across your fleet.

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