MAN GenSets for Chilean Fishing Vessel
MAN Diesel & Turbo received an order for three MAN 6L21/31 gensets to power a wellboat newbuilding for Patagonia Wellboat, the Chilean fish-farming operator. The order is the latest in a long history of wellboat references for MAN Diesel & Turbo in Chile’s domestic fish-farming industry, the company said.
The new wellboat, to be built at Asenav in Valdivia, Chile, will be the first vessel in a new generation of wellboats designed and developed by Asenav in cooperation with Patagonia Wellboat. Engine delivery is scheduled for Q4 2015 with vessel delivery expected May 2016. The new order includes an option for an extra, identical wellboat.
The order for the gensets is the latest in a long line of Chilean fishing and fish-farm orders for medium-speed MAN engines, where especially the 23/30 model has been popular, MAN Diesel & Turbo noted.
The MAN 21/31 engine has already established a solid foothold in other South American fishing markets such as the recent three trawlers ordered by Norwegian-based fishing concern, Copeinca (Corporacion Pesquera Inca S.A.), built at Peru’s SIMA Callao shipyard (Servicios Industriales de la Marina S.A.) and equipped with 6L21/31 main propulsion engines.
The L21/31 engine has a 1,290-1,935 kW output range and, besides applications such as large fishing vessels, is also commonly employed by small to medium-sized tankers, cargo vessels, ferries, Ro-Ro vessels, coasters, tugs, workboats and supply vessels.
The Republic of Chile has a very-well-developed fish-farming industry that frequently uses wellboats to transport the harvest from deepwater cages to holding areas near onshore processing facilities. For MAN Diesel & Turbo, this offered an opportunity to re-establish links with the local shipbuilding industry.
Flanked by the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Andes to the east, Chile’s coastline is almost 6,500 kilometers long and reaches all the way south to the Antarctic Ocean. Carved up by fjords and dotted with islands in sparsely-populated areas, southern Chile is an ideal location for intensive fish production. Forecasts indicate that farmed produce here will provide 40% of the total output by global fisheries in 2015.
Patagonia Wellboats has a fleet of wellboats for the transportation of live salmon and trout, the latest generation of which have all been built by Asenav.
The wellboat concept originates from a desire for a better product. Traditionally, the aquatic culture approach has involved catching fish, processing them in situ and preserving them with ice until the market can be reached.
Wellboats are a unique kind of fishing-vessel-cum-housing-facility where fish are collected from where they are bred and transported live to processing facilities near the market. Huge pipelines transfer the fish from their breeding enclosures at sea to the wellboat’s storage tanks – whose water closely replicates that of the fish-farm with no disadvantage to the fish.
Wellboats carefully control all conditions in their storage tanks such as water temperature, CO2 levels and water quality to help the fish settle and stay calm, minimizing the stress factors that inevitably affect fish quality. There are also cameras in each tank to monitor movement.
Though storage capacity differs, a wellboat typically holds about 1,400 cubic meters of water and houses up to 180 metric tons of fish.
