Konstantinos Pegios -
Technical Dept. Manager,
Elin Shipping Company
"Our fleet consists of three vessels. Two tanker/ro-ro vessels that operate solely on MGO and one chemical tanker that operates primarily on IFO 180 but uses MGO to enter/leave ports. We frequently had a lot of problems with bacterial infections in MGO storage tanks. At the time, we were using Bioguard to treat the MGO tanks and while it was somewhat effective, we actually had to manually clean the MGO tanks every 2,5 years (when the vessels were dry-docked) in order to remove sludge. In May 2015 we started using Fuel Right additive to all our bunker tanks both in MGO and IFO. Immediately we noticed a night and day difference in MGO tanks. There were no problems with microbial infection whatsoever. In fact, we have now stopped using the onboard microbial test kits and we can almost strip the tank to its bottom without having problems with filters clogging as we had before using Fuel Right. I personally inspected the MGO bunker tanks of one of our vessels that was dry-docked on September 2015. The tanks were clean. As for the IFO 180, I carried out a lot of tests, with and without Fuel Right during these eighteen months over several bunkerings as to ensure that I could attribute any positive results to Fuel Right and not to the possible variations in bunker quality. I can now attest that there is less sludge production and the fuel filters’ cleaning intervals increase significantly, about 30% when using Fuel Right. Bunker quality of course still remains of great importance. Overall, ours has been a positive experience. We intend to keep using Fuel Right in the future, treating our MGO and IFO bunkers on a continuous basis."