Economic and population growths are the most important drivers of growing global energy demand. They led to a rapid development of international seaborne trade and an increase in the number of global vessels. Air pollution from these ships is of great concerns and regulations are currently enforced since May 2005 by the International Maritime Organization to limit such pollution. In this study, we will first review the current global energy demand and its driving forces over next decades, second evaluate the existing alternative fuels that can be used as a bunker fuel to reach sustainability with relatively small changes in the existing marine propulsion options and finally focus on near-term solution, which has the potential for large-scale use. The different alternative fuels were compared in terms of several parameters such as availability, renewability, safety, cost, performance, economy and compliance with emission regulations. This comparison revealed that liquefied natural gas could be considered as the future replacement to the current marine bunker fuel. This conclusion has been further verified by comparing diesel engine with different powers when using both heavy fuel oil and liquefied natural gas. The engines were compared against fuel consumption, cost saving as well as emissions. Liquefied natural gas has proved to be better than heavy fuel oil due to fuel cost reduction by about 31% per year and decrease in emissions of SO _x , NO _x , CO ₂ and particulate matter by about 98%, 86%, 11% and 96%, respectively. The resulted emissions from using liquefied natural gas were found to comply with the current International Maritime Organization regulations. Moreover, this article highlights the latest rules and regulations that govern the use of liquefied natural gas as marine fuel onboard ships.

The world is facing the challenge of continuously increasing energy consumption. At the same time, the energy resources are getting scarcer. Despite a sudden significant drop of fuel prices worldwide, research activities that focus on reducing the dependence on fossil fuels as a traditional source of energy still have the preference in the field of shipping industry. The use of clean and renewable energies, such as solar energy for instance, is proposed as a method to improve the ship efficiency. Ships can get the benefits from solar energy due to the fact that most of their upper decks are always exposed to the Sun, especially in sunny water regions. The present paper discusses the effectiveness and challenges of installing solar panels for auxiliary power production on board a ship. As a case study, the research evaluates both economic and environmental benefits resulting from implementing such concept aboard a research vessel.

The introduction of Regulation 17 to the new revised Chapter II-2 of the SOLAS convention, 1974, is evidence of the shift from the current prescriptive-based approach for assessing fire safety design of ships to the state-of-the-art performance-based approach that could accommodate the full advantages of scientific and technological development and allows for innovation to take place. The utilisation of the new approach requires the existence of fire engineering tools to perform consequence analysis, which is the core of the risk analysis technique. Most of these tools have been developed for simulating fire and smoke propagation in civil building compartments, and there is a doubt that these models are applicable for simulating compartment fires aboard ships. The work presented in this paper evaluates the current available fire modelling tools through a series of comprehensive comparisons between representative zone models and a benchmark field model in fire scenarios that involve typical ship layouts.

Surgical resection of extrahepatic biliary malignancies has been increasingly centralized at high-volume tertiary care centers. While this has improved outcomes overall, increased travel burden has been associated with worse survival for many other malignancies. We hypothesized that longer travel distances are associated with worse outcomes for these patients as well.