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We took the energy nobody was counting and made it visible
Englan Fuel Heating AS develops EFH, a patented low tech system for heating heavy fuel oil in ship storage tanks only when, and only where, the heat is actually needed.
Our story
It started with a question that had no good answer
Why does a ship keep hundreds of cubic metres of heavy fuel oil hot for days, when the only oil that needs to be warm is the oil about to leave the tank?
Ask that on the bridge and you get a practical answer: because the oil has to be pumpable when it is needed, and because bringing a cold tank up to temperature takes days you rarely have. That answer is correct. It is also expensive. On many vessels, keeping bunker and storage tanks warm is a permanent, quiet load on the boiler, burning fuel every hour of every voyage to maintain a temperature difference that immediately starts leaking away into the surrounding structure and the sea.
Englan Fuel Heating was formed around a mechanical answer to that problem. Rather than improving insulation or optimising the control of an inherently wasteful process, EFH changes the process itself: contain a small, defined volume of oil, heat that volume on demand, transfer it, and let the rest of the tank sit close to the temperature of its surroundings.
The concept is protected by patent, and the engineering work has gone into the part that decides whether it works in practice: the geometry of the convection shield and the way heated oil behaves inside it.
Company
Englan Fuel Heating AS
Product
EFH, Efficient Fuel Heating
Status
Patented system
Based in
Inndyr, Nordland, Norway
Remove an energy loss the industry had accepted as unavoidable
Fuel that is burned to keep oil warm produces no cargo, no speed and no revenue. It is the purest form of waste on board, and it has been treated as a fixed cost for as long as ships have burned heavy fuel.
Karl-Viggo Sorgard, CEO, Englan Fuel Heating AS
- Make the true cost of continuous HFO tank heating measurable, per vessel, with real data.
- Give owners a decarbonisation measure that pays for itself out of operating cost, not subsidy.
- Keep the solution simple enough that the crew who live with it can trust and maintain it.
- Prove every claim through pilot measurement before it appears in a sales document.
Four decisions that shaped the system
Most efficiency products on the market add complexity in exchange for a percentage. We went the other way deliberately.
01
Low tech, on purpose
EFH is steel, coils, a suction line and basic temperature control. There is no proprietary controller to license, no firmware to patch and no vendor lock in on spares. Anything that can be welded and inspected on board is something a chief engineer can actually rely on.
02
It does not touch your automation
The unit is designed to operate separately from the vessel existing fuel and control systems. That keeps the class and approval conversation narrow, keeps installation risk contained, and means a fault in EFH cannot propagate into systems that matter for propulsion.
03
We change the principle, not the plumbing
Better insulation, better traps and better control all reduce the loss from an approach that was wasteful to begin with. Heating only the transfer volume removes most of the temperature difference that drives the loss in the first place, which is a different order of improvement.
04
Measurement before marketing
We would rather instrument a vessel and publish what we find than lead with a percentage we cannot defend. Condensate metering, boiler consumption and Coriolis mass flow data are the basis for the numbers we put in front of an owner or an investor.
How we work
A deliberately slow path to a bold claim
Energy saving technology in shipping has a credibility problem, and it is largely self inflicted. We are taking the longer route: build it, install it, measure it, then talk about it.
The observation
Recognising that nearly all energy spent on tank heating goes into oil that is not about to be moved.
Patented concept
The convection shield principle is protected. Inventions, know how and patents are owned by Englan AS and Englan Fuel Heating AS.
Buildable configurations
Four system variants developed around real tank geometry, including low tanks, bulkhead mounting and newbuild integration.
Pilot and verification
Installing on a working vessel and measuring steam, condensate, boiler and fuel data before and after, to document the effect.
Built for ships that pay a real price for tank heating
Vessels on HFO and heavy grades
Any ship burning fuel that must be heated to remain pumpable, including fuels with high wax content.
High steam demand for heating
Where a meaningful share of boiler output goes into tank coils rather than into useful work.
Slow steaming and low load trades
Where economizer steam alone cannot cover demand and the oil fired boiler makes up the difference.
Constrained steam capacity
Where freeing up steam for other onboard systems has operational value in its own right.
Fleets under carbon pressure
Owners and managers looking for measurable CO2 reduction that also improves the operating result.
Newbuild projects
Where the heating strategy can be designed in from the start rather than retrofitted around later.
Owners, managers, yards and investors, we are open for conversation
Whether you operate the ships, build them or fund the technology that improves them, we are happy to walk through the principle, the engineering and the commercial case in detail.