From Energy Flows to Monetary Flows - An Innovative Way of Assessing Ship Performances Through Thermo-Economic Analysis

Recent events concerning world economy, environmental policies and resources depletion have grown a large interest in the matter of reducing energy consumption. Unfortunately, even if several cost-effective measures could bring to sensible reductions in fuel consumption, shipping industry is often much reluctant to act in this direction. It is in the opinion of the authors, based on recent studies on the subject (Johnson, 2012),(Johnson, 2011), that a primary reason for this behavior lays in the lack of clear and effective tools for including these matters in the decision making processes. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a new and innovative methodology for improving communication between technical and management departments of a shipping company when dealing with ship fuel consumption analysis. This will be done by making use of Sankey diagrams as graphical support and by converting energy flows to monetary flows, thus showing how energy is being used by different components or wasted to the environment in a much tangible manner. A case study will be presented in order to support the analysis with numerical values