Making oil engines reliable

There were many technical problems to be overcome when the first marine oil engines were installed in ships during the first decade of the twentieth century. It must be remembered that, at this time, the steam engine had been refined into a very robust and highly reliable means of propulsion. In contrast, early oil engines needed specialised care, and were prone to frequent breakdowns if they did not receive it. Engineers trained on oil engines were few and far between. As a result, the oil engine gained an undeserved reputation for unreliability which it did not cast off until after the Second World War.

As so often, it was the demands of war that saw oil engine technology develop. During the First World War Britain and Germany put efforts into developing oil engines to provide surface power for submarines. Steam was unsuitable, although that did not stop the Royal Navy building a class of rather disastrous steam-driven submarines! By the end of the war, the reliability problem of oil engines had been largely solved.

The unstoppable oil engine

Since the Second World War, the advance of the marine oil engine has been unstoppable. It quickly asserted its superiority and drove out the steam engine, to the extent that very steam ships have been built in post-war years, and virtually none since 1955. Advances in efficiency, and even more in the oil engine’s ability to burn low quality (and therefore cheap) fuel, have seen it unchallenged. It has even displaced the steam turbine as the machinery of choice for fast, sophisticated vessels like ferries. With no challenger apparent, oil engines will propel ships for the foreseeable future.