Bunkering operations

Bunkering operations are the shipboard evolution by which fuel oil is transferred to a ship from a barge, a shore terminal or another ship, governed operationally by the ship safety management system and documented under MARPOL Annex VI Regulation 18. The evolution is a safety-critical transfer of a pollutant under time pressure, and it is where almost every fuel quality and quantity dispute is either created or prevented.

The full article will run the sequence in order: the pre-transfer conference and checklist, the agreed transfer rate and topping-off rate, the emergency shutdown arrangement, tank line-up and valve integrity, continuous drip sampling to form the retained sample, ullage and sounding measurement, temperature and density measurement, the volume correction that converts observed volume to mass, and the signing of the bunker delivery note. It will address the quantity dispute directly, including the cappuccino effect and the practice of taking independent survey.

The article will also cover the arrangements that differ from the ordinary shore transfer: ship-to-ship delivery at an anchorage, simultaneous operations, and the distinct regime that applies to LNG and methanol bunkering under the IGF Code. LNG bunkering departs from the oil-fuel sequence at almost every step, adding inerting, cool-down, a prohibition on discharging gas to atmosphere while filling and a ship-shore emergency shutdown link, and it is covered under the LNG fuel system . It links to marine gas oil , heavy fuel oil and the bunker delivery note .