Batteries in Offshore Support Vessels - Pollution, Climate Impact and Economics

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThis paper assesses the pros and the cons of installing batteries on offshore support vessels. These vessels are specially designed to provide services to oil and gas operations, such as anchor handling, supply and subsea operations. They have multiple engines and advanced dynamic positioning systems to ensure that they can perform their duties with high reliability at nearly any sea state. Combined with high safety requirements, this has resulted in general operational patterns with vessels running multiple combustion engines even at calm water conditions. For emissions, low engine loads yield high emissions of exhaust gases such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and aerosols such as black carbon (BC), due to less favorable combustion conditions. The high span for these vessels between low loads and high, and their great need for potential power at short notice, motivate our examination of hybrid setups with electric: the vessel segment should be more favorable than many. We find that combining batteries with combustion engines reduces local pollution and climate impact, while the economics with current battery cost and fuel prices is good enough for new vessels, but not good enough for retrofits.

The electric propulsion system as a green solution for management strategy ofCO2emission in ocean shipping: A comprehensive review

“…Hybrid propulsion systems were used on offshore ships, 96 tugs, 97 and destroyers 88 . The US Navy DDG‐51‐class destroyer is equipped with a hybrid propulsion system with gas turbines as the main engine.…”

Mission-oriented Modular Control of Retrofittable Marine Power Plants

“…To facilitate these missions, different type of power plants are used. While hybrid propulsion and a hybrid power supply is emerging , most vessels of this kind use electric propulsion with a mechanical power supply [36,41,42], and their power plant control systems focus on the optimal power split between the different generator sets, for which the authors of [9,43] propose two algorithms, a genetic algorithm and a particle swarm algorithm. [47].…”

“…For the analysis on tugboats, data from [4, 6-8, 12, 32, 33, 160] is used, the work of [9,36,41,43,107,161] is used for OSVs, and for cruise ships the work of [76,77,79,80,162] is used. They all provide clear information on the used operational modes, the propulsion power and auxiliary power, and also the total required power.…”

Data-Driven Methodology for the Analysis of Operational Profile and the Quantification of Electrical Power Variability on Marine Vessels

“…To illustrate an example of application, we assume that for further analysis, the installed power of the vessel is equal to 8000kW [34]. The support for a new power system design can based on the properties of the decomposed power signal, which are summarised in Table II.…”