Speaking at the Maritime Forum UAE last week, Gamal Fekry, ceo of Red Sea Marine Management, branded the process a “mess”, and said that changes to legislation would cost shipowners millions of dollars.
The IMO’s decision in October 2016 to introduce a global 0.5% sulphur cap on marine fuels from 2020 took many industry professionals by surprise, as the organisation had previously said it was also considering implementing the cap from 2025.
Speaking at the Abu Dhabi event, Fekry said: “We were under the impression that talks would continue in 2018 when we could look at the impact of low sulphur and the cap.
“But the IMO has followed Europe and China – which is the most polluted atmosphere in the world, by the way – and decided to bring in the new rules in 2020 – forget about the studies, forget about the availability of low sulphur.
“What nobody has spoken about is what are we going to do with this sulphur, where is it going to go?”
Fekry also told the some 300 industry professionals at the forum that ship owners and managers such as himself faced paying out millions of dollars to make their current and future fleets compliant with new legislation.
“I have to revisit contracts we’ve signed because the ships have to be 2020 compliant. In monetary terms, the same ship that I have already signed for is going to cost me another $3m just to make it sulphur compliant because the IMO decided to follow Europe.
“We have to go back to the drawing board with our designs as the new ships need to house scrubber towers, new pipeline systems and an extra bunker tank.
“So the gross tonnage of the ship is also going to increase, as will fuel consumption. Nobody has looked into how this is going to affect the ship owners and operators, and the modifications are going to cost us a lot of money……it is a mess.”
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