One of the best-known names in marine lubes is back, promising to shake up the sector and offer owners new levels of service. Caroline Huot has been appointed as global head of lubricants at Cockett Marine Oil – her past career includes stints at Total, Gulf Oil Marine and Unimarine among others.
“Owners and managers will face increased complexity when contemplating lubrication matters in 2017,” Huot tells Maritime CEO. Managing cylinder oil issues and switching between the multiple grades needed to face various operational situations is substantially increased by strong availability issues for high BN and lower BN cylinder oils which can be found only in main ports, she explains.
“These bottlenecks are originated in the push to reduce capital employed in various oil companies,” Huot says. This trend is increasingly strong when it comes to difficult logistics areas of the world where keeping stocks is considered as a pain and not just routine business for shipping.
Huot also believes that many of her rivals have reduced the number of ports they are covering.
“It is our belief that this trend will increase in the next few years thus creating more and more issues to supply vessels with one single brand,” she says.
On the technical side Cockett believes that the need for flexible easy to operate cold corrosion monitoring systems is increasing. As per OEM own recommendations, just using the right grade of cylinder oil is not enough, trend monitoring and regular control of possible cold corrosion is the only way to prevent expensive corrective maintenance issues, Huot points out.
Then with the IMO 2020 deadline on global sulphur caps for shipping, new product research and development will be necessary as well as deep insight on the interaction between fuels and lubricants, Huot reckons.
