What’s the cost of a drillship trip halfway across the world?

It is costly to sail 14,183 Nm from Pusan in South Korea to Curacao in the Caribbean Sea and the bill is paid by our customers and the environment, reads a story by Maersk Drilling, a Danish offshore drilling contractor.

5,206 Mt of fuel is used during the voyage, which means an expenditure of USD 4.7 million for the customer and 16,346 Mt of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere affecting the environment.

Because of the high costs, a small reduction in fuel consumption has a large value. Maersk Drilling is engaged in an energy efficiency project for its newbuilds together with Maersk Maritime Technology.

The project involves an Energy Management System (MSPS), which uses KWH meters and/or data from the Power Management Switchboard to capture real time consumption on-board.

Maersk Drilling says it has studied and analysed the fuel consumption of the two drillships Maersk Viking and Maersk Valiant on their voyages from South Korea to the Caribbean Sea, headed for operations in the US Gulf of Mexico.

“From the initial studies, it became evident that it is critical to the data quality that we implement the MSPS earlier in the process”, explains Assistant Asset Manager, Steffen Jacobsen and continues;

“It takes two to four weeks of familiarization with MSPS reporting before the data quality is sufficiently high and a complete performance assessment can be made. Learnings will be applied to Maersk Venturer and drillship IV, when they are ready to leave the yards and head for operations”.
Potential for added reductions

“There are a lot of low hanging fruits and still a long way to go. Besides the voyage itself, there is great potential for reducing energy consumption during actual operation by e.g. reducing the number of engines running at low loads and reducing hotel consumption by installing variable frequency drivers on lube and cooling water pumps”, says Steffen Jacobsen.

According to the company, the business case is clear: the customer saves fuel costs, the CO2 emissions of our operations are reduced, and Maersk Drilling’s Environment & Climate Change strategy is supported.

“Because it is our customers who are accountable for fuel consumption and hence emissions, we believe that we can generate the greatest value by collaborating with them and other business partners to develop and implement energy efficient solutions”, Head of Environment & Chemicals, Maurice Meehan says.