Opening MEPC 66 on Monday, Sekimizu bemoaned that the fact that there were “more than 10 years” formulating ballast water legislation, as well as “another decade since the adoption of the Ballast Water Management Convention in 2004”.
“We have an ever-growing number of type-approved ballast water management systems (BWMS) now available, including for ships with high capacity and high flow rate, and these are being fitted in increasing numbers,” he said.
“The disappointingly slow pace of ratifications of several adopted conventions directly related to the work of your committee also continues to concern me deeply.
“Since MEPC 65, held in May 2013, the Ballast Water Management Convention only gained two additional ratifications. To date, 38 States with an aggregate of slightly over 30% of the world’s merchant fleet tonnage have embraced the Convention. But, it is still not enough to bring it into force… we need 35%.
“We cannot escape from the need for prevention of the global spread of harmful invasive species via transfers of unmanaged ballast waters and sediments, because these harmful transfers are inherently linked to the expansion of shipping. This is, in my view, a risk management measure. Unless we take action now, you never know what problem would happen when, where and in what magnitude in the future. Shipping cannot escape from this issue and we must implement the best technology available now. In this context and as I have said also many times, any work on the unwanted transfer of invasive species through ships’ ballast water and sediments must be done under the Ballast Water Management Convention in force.”
However, speaking at a ballast water presentation committee hosted in London by the Marshall Islands on Tuesday, Tim Wilkins, manager of the Asia-Pacific region and senior manager for the environment at Intertanko, said that the current legislation was “not ready” and that a number of changes must be put in place if the legislation was to be effective, and called for a more stringent type approval process for BWMS.
“The guidelines need to be tighter; we need to test these systems in a range of temperatures, with different types of organisms, using different types of turbid water, increased sediment, and also flow rates. Flow rates are alarming – there are type approved systems on the market that have been tested for 60 cu m per hour, but are approved for installation up to 6000 cu m.”
Due to what they see as a lax approach to type approvals in the first instance, Wilkins added, shipowners had to contend with Port State Control inspections that were “more stringent than the type approval process itself”.
Shipowner resistance to the implementation of the BWM Convention was less to do with the cost of compliance - “Yes, it’s an expensive outlay - $1-1.5m for some of these systems,” but rather a lack of confidence in the investment, argued Wilkins. “The real crippling point in this is that it isn’t necessarily down to cost, but actually paying for something that did not work - paying for something they do not have the confidence in.”
Intertanko felt that discussions had made some progress, with governments agreeing, after MEPC 64, that the Type Approval process for the systems required greater scrutiny. “They did acknowledge that there was a lack of transparency in the type approval process,” said Wilkins. “There are a lot of type approval certificates out there with very poor information on the BWTS.” Changes to the implementation schedule agreed during MEPC 65, were also a welcome relief for shipowners fearing a bottleneck of installations at shipyards, enabling owners of vessels to wait until their next renewal survey, rather than having to rush to a yard on the day of implementation.
Intertanko’s concerns mirrored those discussed by the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) in a statement last week, which similarly called for a more stringent type approval process: “At the moment… the position of ICS is that it cannot actively encourage additional IMO Member States to ratify the BWM Convention until there is confidence that the new treatment equipment will actually work, or that when in operational use it will comply with the standards that IMO has set for controlling unwanted marine micro-organisms,” the statement read.
Like Intertanko, ICS also called for a “grandfathering” arrangement, whereby the first generation of ballast water treatment systems would not be penalised for the life of the ship, and spoke out against over-zealous port state control inspections, indicating that “many problems” could be addressed if ballast water sampling by port state control authorities should only take place only after “clear grounds” for deliberate attempts at non-compliance have been established.
Tipping Japan for the next signatory to the convention, followed by Singapore, Wilkins added: “We have made some progress; we are working on the port state control side, but we want to send a signal to governments, saying that this convention still isn’t quite ready. The industry is not quite ready to take this on board yet.
“There’s a signal there for the IMO Secretariat – as you well know, the secretary general of the IMO has been pushing very hard for the governments to ratify this convention. We want to send a signal to the secretary general as well - you need to listen to this industry.”
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