Norway’s scrubber manufacturer Yara Marine Technologies has made its footprint in China with the opening of its new Shanghai office, responding to increasing demand for scrubbers in newbuilds and retrofit projects in the Asia-Pacific region.

The world’s largest LNG bunkering vessel owned by Babcock Schulte Energy has started operations in Northwest Europe under charter to the Blue LNG joint venture.

With just about a year left before the enforcement of the IMO 2020 global fuel sulphur cap, the shipping community is now seeing a global phenomenon of LNG bunkering services and infrastructure taking shape.

The world’s busiest port Singapore is to ban the use of open-loop scrubbers in its waters and ships will have to use compliant fuel once the IMO 2020 sulphur cap comes into force.

Taiwan’s seaports will enforce the use of 0.5% sulphur content fuel from 1 January 2019, ahead of IMO’s Marpol Annex VI global regulation from 2020, the Club Correspondents Pro-Marine Law Office in Taipei has advised.

New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) will launch trading for 11 marine fuel 0.5% futures contracts on the CME Globex electronic platform from 9 December this year, roughly one year ahead of IMO’s 2020 fuel sulphur cap regulation.

Eagle Bulk has exercised options on 15 scrubbers bringing its firm ordered tally of exhaust gas cleaning units to 34.

While the sulphur cap is still very much the issue of the day Martin Stopford, president of Clarkson Research Services, says the industry needs to start thinking now how it will meet the IMO's goal of a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050.

The use of scrubbers to meet the 2020 sulphur cap, their lack of regulatory framework, and impact on the market were very much under discussion at the Greener Shipping Summit in Athens last week.

Feeder vessel owner MPC Container Ships has lined up a major potential scrubber orders for the majority of its fleet.