Seatrade Maritime Review, March 2021Seatrade Maritime Review, March 2021

Already the IMO 2020 fuel oil sulphur limit has brought about a 70% cut in total sulphur oxide emissions in shipping, ushering in what the International Maritime Organization calls ‘a new era of cleaner air in ports and coastal areas’. A year on, just 55 cases of low sulphur fuel being unavailable have been reported to the UN body, which it says is testament to the shipping industry’s state of preparedness for what was felt would be a radical upheaval.

Now decarbonisation has become the big challenge, and a raft of new measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from existing ships is due to be implemented as soon as 2023, as outlined in the first of our new series of Regulatory Updates (pp.10-11). Ship operators, designers, class societies, flags and equipment manufacturers are all gearing up for the challenge, as detailed variously within.

Excessive carbon emissions affect not only the air, of course, but also the seas which absorb them, causing water temperatures to rise and posing an existential threat to marine life. This January saw the start of what the UN has declared the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, aimed at ‘supporting efforts to reverse the cycle of decline in ocean health’.

Shipping has already played its part in recent decades, banning discharges from ships of plastics and other harmful types of garbage, underwater hull paints that can pose a threat to marine life, and most recently untreated ballast water that might contain invasive species.

Next steps are likely to include control of ‘biofouling’ and any leakage into the water of effluent from hull cleaning operations (pp.21-23) as well as a closer look by the IMO at the effect of concentrated discharges of washwater from ‘open-loop’ exhaust gas cleaning systems or ‘scrubbers’, the results of which will feature in a forthcoming Regulatory Update.

Click here to read the full issue of Seatrade Maritime Review, March 2021