Comparison between natural gas and diesel fuel oil onboard gas turbine powered ships

Abstract EN

The marine fuel plays a key role in determining the performance of marine power plants onboard ships.

Many studies have pointed to the possibility of using natural gas as an alternative fuel for marine power plants.

The increase number of LNG carriers worldwide and the growing of its capacity in the last decades, this had given the opportunity to increase the possibility of using natural gas as a main fuel taking into account advantage of evaporation process which occurs during the voyage for energy generation.

The current paper analyzes and discusses the change of the performance of marine gas turbine power plant when using natural gas as a main fuel.

The study showed that the most significant parameters related to marine gas turbine performance had some (from -1.76% to +0.97%) of those achieved by diesel fuel.

Concerning fuel consumption, the paper showed that the specific fuel consumption for natural gas is lower than that of diesel by about 13.5% at the same power output.

This is an important factor to push this technology forward, particularly with growing environmental problems that are caused by the conventional marine fuel.