Extraction of Bunkering Services from Automatic Identification System Data and Their International Comparisons

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article addresses a quantitative analysis study of ship refueling operations. Due to the limitations of the data, the quantitative information and statistics for refueling are very limited. The study aims to develop a quantitative method to analyze and compare actual refueling operations in the gate area by extracting misestimated ships and matching them spatio-temporally with ship fuel barges. The algorithm in the study considers the characteristic behavior of the burning barge, both in the oil refining and the docking of the burning Y ship base. Subsequently, the study focused on refueling in three port areas and compared from multiple perspectives. An algorithm was developed to extract rendezvous between sunken barges and other vessels based on AIS data. Based on the estimated oil service data, the characteristics and differences of the oil service time and start time in Tokyo Bay, Busan port and Singapore port according to the sinking conditions were studied.

There are some minor problems in the details. Minor revision suggestions of the paper are as follows:

1. In the abstract and introduction, the purpose of "quantitative analysis of ship refueling operation" is not clearly reflected. Please explain it in more details.

2. Works related to energy storage of fuels and algorithms are suggested to add: An integrated model with stable numerical methods for fractured underground gas storage. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2023, 393, 136268. Application of sustainable basil seed as an eco-friendly multifunctional additive for water-based drilling fluids, Petroleum Science, Volume 18, Issue 4, 2021, Pages 1163-1181.

3. There are some irregular figures in the article, please review and revise them carefully: Fig.7: the labels are too large and out of the figure itself. Please shrink the labels; Fig.8: the labels “Tokyo, Busan, Singapore” should be repeated on every sub-figures. The three sub-figures should be numbered as Fig.8 (a), Fig.8 (b) and Fig.8 (c). They should not share horizontal labels and vertical labels. Similar treatments should be done for Fig.9-Fig.12. Part of the "Relationship in LOA" ordinate is missing in Figure 10.

4. In subsection 4.4, whether the threshold of the rendezvous at distances between vessels in bunkering operations is set to 150m can be equally suitable for both high crowding and low crowding ports.

Author Response

1. Thank you for your comment. We modified the fourth paragraph of the introduction section, including adding some phrases, according to your comment. We also slightly modified the abstract but the modification was very limited due to the limitation of the word count of the abstract (200 words).
2. Thank you for your comment. According to your advice, as well as that from reviewer 2, we added 11 papers related to bunkering network planning and LNG and other alternative fuel bunkering.
3. Thank you for your comment. We modified each figure according to your comment, except some vertical labels cannot inserted for each graph because of space limitations.
4. In this study, we adopted the same threshold in all ports to keep the consistency regarding the precision of the method. However, we consider the detailed examination of setting the threshold to be one of the important issues in the future. We added a related sentence at the end of section 4.4.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Good day.

The article is interesting, but needs some refinements:

1. the abstract should be expanded and clearly spelled out what you are offering new in bunkering services;

2. in the article, conduct a broader comparative analysis of the provision of bunkering services in the world;

3. to supplement the critical literature review, because 21 sources are not enough!

thank you.

Author Response

1. Thank you for your valuable comment. Unfortunately, the limitation of the word count of the abstract is 200 words; thus, we cannot expand the abstract sufficiently. However, we slightly modified it based on the comments not only from reviewer 2 (you) but also from reviewer 1.
2. Thank you for your valuable comment. We would like to expand our method to other ports that were not included in this study in the future. We added a related phrase in the last paragraph of the conclusion section.
3. Thank you for your comment. We added 11 papers related to bunkering network planning and LNG and other alternative fuel bunkering accordingly.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I advise authors to read carefully the content of the attached file in order to perform the minor corrections I detailed there for the present article.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English is fine and very few, minor corrections are suggested in this manuscript.

 

Author Response

Thank you for your detailed, valuable comments. We appreciate you very much. We revised our paper as follows based on your comments:

I, II, III, V, VI, VII, VIII, X, XI, XII: We revised our paper accordingly in all the places that you pointed out. Thank you for your comments.

IV: We checked the alignment of the manuscript in the paragraphs that you pointed out, but all of them are already “all justified,” not “left justified.”

IX: We replaced “moor” with “dock.”

XIII, XIV, XV, XVI: We revised the format of references according to your comments, as well as some other places.

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Congratulations on the article. It makes a very valuable contribution to practice at a time when much is being said about reducing consumption of non-renewable fuels.

Author Response

Thank you for your evaluation!