The Arctic is made of very fragile ecosystems. Oil polution is a nightmare as help is always remote. We separated the tanks to minimize the impact of any accident.
There are 5 storage tanks which run from the front watertight bulkhead to the watertight engineroom compartment. This serves 3 purposes:
- in case of loss of integrity under the waterline (a hole, a breach), the water will not penetrate into the boat but will stay in the affected tank. As fuel is lighter than water, the fuel leak will be reduced. Other tanks will not be affected and the boat will be able to "sail as usual" to reach a safe place
- as these tanks don't directely feed the engines, we can ballast one tank to an other to optimize the stability while running, or just for the comfort of the crew
- we can separate various qualities of fuel or isolate a contamination issue
The boat also have 2 gravity tanks on each side. We pump (and filter) the amount of fuel needed for the day (or week), from the hull storage tanks to these daytanks.
The engines are almost garanteed to be always fed with fuel that is free of water or contaminent. It's a 2 stages system.
At the same time, we use the daytanks (1.000 liters each) for lateral stability as we can control the amount of fuel in each tanks.