I'm joined today by Roberto Comelli business manager for fuel conditioning systems at Alfa Laval. Now Roberto with 2020 just around the corner, what sort of concerns are your customers expressing about low sulphur fuels? We have quite a few and they are ranging from fuel availability and pricing or how to handle fuel onboard but more and more questions are about fuel stability, fuel quality and the possibility of risks in mixing them. So now after many years were with the old application was forgotten, now there is a new focus on how to treat the fuel onboard and how should be the best practice to do so and we are as of Laval the only company that can actually connect your tanks to your funnel so passing through the separators then the fuel conditioning system with the filters you go to the engine when also described so we can actually now think about an integrated solution where we control all the process and even if technology is not yet there to counteract fuel quality or compatibility in a full way we can now elaborate strategies to mitigate the risk when something wrong happens aboard. This is where we are heading. - And in your experience customers are looking for an end-to-end solution from a single single supplier? I think that more and more they will understand the benefit of relying on something that is not just installed there but works and create values working together because we know we are more than 40 years into the business of fuel conditioning systems so we have quite an experience while for separators we are more than 100 year into this. So also in that and also in that step of the process we have accumulated quite a lot of experience so we know basically what to do and now the entire industry is moving towards more automatized systems and this automation will bring just values into that especially in a moment where uncertainty is something that can be recovered sometimes in a hard way when you have to dispose a bank of fuel because basically it was of bad quality or you mix it up by mistake to fuels and now you have to move them away from your entire that's a fuel system. - And with that experience of fuel conditioning systems do you think these new fuels are going to need less conditioning? More conditioning? Perhaps different conditioning than the current high sulfur fuels? Yes and no in the terms of that you will have a much wider variety of densities and viscosities which means and they will, let's say, probably they will require less heating but of course you will have many different densities and therefore you cannot just set your equipment statically what like we were doing in like 20 years ago and forget about that you will need instead the systems that will just adapt to the instantaneous conditions so what actually I'm separating now what actually i'm heating or pumping now the system should react and understand exactly what should do for the best of the engine so this is why we are moving to the concept of adaptive line of equipment, adaptive fuel line and this will go through automation basically it's the easiest way to make something reacting compared to when we were just one quality of life and one quality of aerosol and you are seldom using gas oil during the ship lifetime. -So does this mean that ship owners will have to replace existing fuel handling equipment? I think that if you look at the equipment the singular piece of equipment that you have on board, let's say, the viscometer - you don't have to replace the viscometer it's more like that you need to change the way the viscometer is used on board because once you add the viscometer reading viscosity and then you were controlling the heating media in order to keep viscosity stable and also temperature was in some way set at a certain value and that was it. Now you can have changes in viscosities and your system should not be, lets say, manually operated to changing parameters and then resetting the system it should just work fine whatever you basically throw in so you will actually see the need for more process steps like could be in old vessels you could need to add a cooling function but then you need also to control this cooling together with the heating which means that you will feel much more now the benefit of something that will control the entire process so when you want to change from one bunker to the other you do want to do this in the best way for your engine and therefore you need to have an automated control because once you were used to have just one quality of a have a few element call it of gas oil and you could train your crew to, let's say, let's call it one static process now one good practice to do that tomorrow you can bunker many different fuels in many different locations and of course you will need very skilled at people if you don't want to do this fuel handling manually adding now also the potential risk of sometimes having fuel incompatible of course when you need to control this before because today technology it's not yet there when it comes to spotting ability you can detect if something is going wrong because you feel you can buy the filter for instance you can see more a sludge buildup or a higher pressure drop when you are starting mixing the fuels because you are changing from one bunker to the other. These are, let's say science that can tell you just in time that you are doing something wrong so in the ships probably in the end there will be some tank of safe fuel you instantly switch over to that in order to keep your propulsion safe. Now of course you're not changing the single viscometer or you're not changing the pumps now but of course you would like to move your filter from the cold side to the hot side and you would like to add automation in order that you can have a safe process that can help you when it goes critical. -It's interesting some of the points you made there you talk about compatibility for example now one of your pieces of equipment your FCM one unit can actually produce fuel blends but what does that mean if their concerns about compatibility with blends? Actually in north shipping we are also renovating the FCM generate a product lineup also we are introducing new automation and we are preparing also even more to handle more fuels but again what we can do, and we have thought out of this particular features already in 2013 and we introduced it as a default feature in all our boosters is to be able if I keep it with mass flow meters that's the only thing you have to care about when ordering it because the automation is already there, you can blend by mass, so proportionally in mass blend fuels and keep this blending stable let's say in terms of proportion in order to if you are starting from well-known bunkers obtain basically a mathematical blend. We cannot do anything about fuel instability if these two bunkers are actually in stable or incompatible then we can just stay with that what we will detect is only that our filter is going to get clogged very fast so probably these two fuels are incompatible. So today not even our release of booster can actually detecting inline incompatibility you need to have the test as the industry now is, let's say, going back to and it is quite well aware of and this is the safest way. Then what actually we can say is probably in the ship you will have a different fuel end link so you will segregate fuels before the booster and have space for that's moving bed bunker fuels, bunker of fuels which are not in compliance so you can, you could spot that are creating problems somewhere else in order to leave your propulsion being running safe now and use only the ones that are safe to use but we are actually working in this direction. Technology as I said is not yet there but new technologies are coming now so another topic fuel compatibility is one side but you also have compliance on the other so you do want to test if for instance the sulfur content in the fuel is in compliance because then you could have run in your tanks many different fuels you'll want to be safe about what you're burning. Again technology is not yet there for every few awards it could be okay for gas oil but not for every fuels and I complain so it will come. - I just want to pick up on that future technologies I mean looking into the long term you know particularly with the IMO's greenhouse gas targets what's that going to mean for companies like yours and fuel conditioning as as a concept going forward as we develop these ever more sophisticated fuels to meet these future requirements? It's the perfect fuel is not yet there no so it has to be engineered and the solution has to be found but as we think today we do think that there will not be one single solution so the right way is to continue a study solution for all the opportunities because not all the owners can good use that fuel not all the ship could run in that way so as we are done today we have experimented we are now embracing the fuel lines concepts so we have a fuel line for the residual and oil fuels. We have a tested a methanol and if your fuel conditioning systems we have developed another fuel condition in line for the LPG and we are now starting developing like a spin-off of it for ammonia fuels. So the new the newer fuel will come and we will provide to the industry we are let's say why not more than 100 years in the marine industry and we will continue so we will need to develop solution for all the opportunities whether will come in front Well thanks Roberta I think you've you know some valuable insights there into what can be currently done but also I think that that forward-looking comments that you you you made at the end there I think that's that's going to be particularly relevant I think to to ship owners in the years to come so thank you very much indeed for sharing your thoughts with us. Thank you Paul and thank you ShipInsight for the opportunity given.