First Fuel Oil Warship

HMS Spiteful was a Spiteful-class torpedo boat destroyer built at Jarrow, England, by Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company for the Royal Navy and launched in 1899. Specified to be able to steam at 30 knots, she spent her entire career serving in the seas around the British Isles, and in 1904 became the first warship to be powered solely using fuel oil. In 1913 she was classified as a B-class destroyer. She was sold and scrapped in 1920.

                                                               HMS Spiteful

 

Fuel Oil

In 1904 Spiteful was instrumental in the Royal Navy's adoption of fuel oil as a source of power in place of coal. In July that year the journal Scientific American described her as "the first warship to be so equipped."  Her boilers were modified to burn only fuel oil as part of ongoing experiments and, on 7–8 December 1904, "vitally important" comparative trials were carried out near the Isle of Wight with Spiteful's sister ship Peterel burning coal, in which Spiteful performed significantly better. Problems with the production of smoke were surmounted so that using oil produced no more smoke than coal, and it was found that the ship's crew could be reduced, since fewer were required in the boiler rooms. Whereas Peterel required six stokers during the trials, Spiteful required only three boiler-room crew; while Peterel's crew had to dispose of 1.5 tons (1.52 tonnes) of ash and clinker, Spiteful produced no such waste. Further, while Peterel took 1.5 hours to prepare for steaming, Spiteful took 10 minutes. In June 1906 the same journal reported that Spiteful was being used by the Admiralty to train engine-room crews in the operation of oil-burning equipment.

Although the trials of 1904 proved the significant advantages of fuel oil over coal in powering warships, they did not lead to the immediate abandonment of coal as a source of power by the Royal Navy. While Britain's internal supply of coal was plentiful, it had no reserves of oil. William Palmer, who was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1904, regarded a change to oil as "impossible", for reasons of availability. This took time to overcome, but it was achieved through foreign policy and government activity in the oil market, beginning with the Royal Commission on Fuel and Engines of 1912, promoted by Winston Churchill, who by then was First Lord of the Admiralty. The Navy committed itself to change in the same year, when all of the ships that it set out to procure were designed to use fuel oil.

                                   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Spiteful_(1899)