Workboat and offshore vessel owners are installing fuel measurement sensors and remote monitoring services for oil majors such as BP and ExxonMobil, Martyn Wingrove reports from New Orleans. Nautical Control Solutions (NCS) has deployed FuelTrax fuel monitor systems on around 300 workboats, offshore support vessels and commercial ships on the request of the fuel purchasers, the charterers of these vessels.
In the latest contract awards, NCS is deploying FuelTrax on vessels chartered to ExxonMobil for operations offshore Nigeria. According to one of the company’s engineers, FuelTrax is being installed on security and support vessels in the Gulf of Guinea to enable the US oil major to monitor fuel consumption. Around half of the installations have been completed so far.
FuelTrax will also be installed on offshore support vessels owned by Topaz Energy & Marine and chartered to BP for operations in the Caspian Sea. The NCS engineer said this would allow BP to monitor fuel consumption on the vessels. BP has already ordered FuelTrax for its own fleet and some of the vessels it charters elsewhere.
These systems monitor, measure and report fuel consumption in real-time. They send the data, GPS-stamped, every 15 minutes by satellite to the FuelNet online data repository, where it is accessible to customers and archived indefinitely. NCS sales director James Slaughter said the company deploys its own transmission antennas on vessels and has access to its own L-band satellite coverage to ensure the data transfer is not competing with other satellite communications requirements. He said FuelTrax is deployed on around 300 vessels worldwide.
NCS has been collecting and archiving this data since 2005 from hundreds of vessels and continues to collect it at the rate of megabytes per day. Today the database contains terabytes of data. The NCS FuelTrax data collection system can be universally applied to any vessel and fleet of vessels.
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