The International Chamber of Shipping is warning of new environmental regulations about to impact ship operators at more or less the same time.
The International Chamber of Shipping is warning of “an avalanche of new environmental regulations” about to impact ship operators at more or less the same time.
Its comments were made in advance of the Oct. 13-17 meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO).
The chamber highlighted three areas:
- Implementation concerns about the IMO Ballast Water Management Convention expected to take effect in 2016. Chamber Chairman Masamichi Morooka said unless problems are resolved this month at the IMO the regulations “will not be fit for purpose. The industry does not wish to spend billions of dollars on new treatment equipment only to be told it doesn’t work.” Shipowners, who have installed systems or are about to, need to be confident that regulators will find their equipment compliant.
- The requirement, which takes effect in January, that fuel used in emission control areas have no more than 0.1 percent sulfur. The chamber said there’s still much uncertainty as to how that regulation will be implemented. It wants a harmonized approach and “use of bunker delivery notes, rather than fuel sampling, as prime face evidence of compliance.” Morooka said there’s perhaps even greater concern about whether there will be sufficient availability of low-sulfur fuel and what its price will be when a global cap on sulfur content in fuel moves to 0.5 percent globally in 2020. It would like an IMO-mandated study on sulfur fuel supplies to be done earlier than 2018.
- The chamber said it supports development by IMO of a global system of mandatory carbon dioxide data collection from ships, provided that the system is simple to administer and primarily based on fuel consumption. But it has not agreed to the development of any kind of mandatory operational efficiency indexing system which might be used to penalize ships that are deemed less efficient. “No two voyages are the same due to factors such as weather and ocean conditions,” Morooka said. “Many of our members think there is a danger that the development of such an operational indexing system would lead to serious market distortion.”
This commentary was published in the October 2014 issue of American Shipper.
