May 09, 2018
Austral Fisheries announced today that the off-season refit of their largest vessel, the Atlas Cove, has exceeded expectations with results from their first fishing trip of the season achieving fuel savings of 29%.
Built in Norway in 1999, the Atlas Cove started life as a North Sea pelagic sein trawler with a 4320 kW MAK main engine driving a single shaft with variable pitch propeller. Austral purchased her in 2014 and undertook a major conversion to a long-range trawler/longliner. This unique combination is ideally suited to the operational needs of the Heard Island fishery where she can trawl for Mackerel icefish in the same trip as she can longline for Glacier 51 toothfish, as well as conducting the annual random stratified trawl survey that has been informing Australian scientists and fishery managers since 1998. The conversion was a success, but her fuel consumption remained high, which was a powerful motivator to explore for ways to improve fuel efficiency.
Additional motivation comes from the fact that Austral Fisheries is the first fishing company in the world that has completely offset its greenhouse gas emissions, when it became carbon neutral in 2016. Austral CEO, David Carter, said of the project, “Two years ago we decided that we could not stand by and continue with business as usual in the face of our changing climate, and so we chose to completely offset our emissions by supporting a native biodiverse reforestation project in Western Australia, and started to investigate ways to lower our emissions”.
This led the company to invest in a major modification to the drive train, partnering with Norwegian firms, Brunvoll AS and Baatbygg AS, to de-rate the main engine, and install a new gearbox, shaft, propeller, and shaft generator/motor. The new configuration is providing the crew with more flexibility in managing the ship’s requirements for propulsion and electrical loads under the various steaming, trawling and longlining requirements. Peter Stevens, General Manager at Austral, said “This was a really exciting project for us. It made sense financially, with a sound return on investment, as well as environmentally, by reducing our emissions in the process.”
The remainder of the year will see the vessel operating in longline mode, and Austral expects an annual saving of around 600,000 L of diesel, and 1700t of CO2-e emissions. This is the equivalent of removing around 500 cars off the road for a year.
Contact:
David Carter, CEO, [email protected], +61 8 9217 0100 (GMT+8)