A good example is residents in White Bay, near Balmain in Sydney, Australia, who have complained of suffering serious health problems since a cruise ship terminal moved from Barangaroo in 2013.
This follows residents at Port Melbourne’s Beacon Cove, whose apartments face onto Melbourne’s busy Station Pier, airing concerns they are being badly affected by fumes from tourist ships burning what they describe as ‘highly toxic bunker fuel’.
Cases like these emphasise that finding means of reducing black carbon is becoming more urgent, especially when under pressure from port operators as part of a region’s overall emissions reduction strategy.
Indeed the Port of Antwerp recently announced that it would grant voluntary discounts to seagoing vessels that use alternative technology to reduce emissions of particle matter (PM), a group of pollutants that includes carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2) and black carbon solids (soot). Currently, this scheme only rewards PM reductions achieved through scrubbers or LNG bunkers.
Multi-hydrocarbon fuel/water emulsions expert, SulNOx, said it has developed a pre-combustion technology that can make a significant impact with minimal upfront investment cost is fuel/water emulsions.
SulNOxEco™ Fuels permanently combine standard fuels with water to both lower flame temperatures in combustion engines to reduce emission of oxides of nitrogen by over 60%(NOx) and significantly aids efficient fuel burn; thereby drastically cutting PM by over 90%, while achieving up to an 8% improvement in economy.
So, importantly for the cruise and ferry sector, emulsions eliminate black plumes emitted at sea and at port and could therefore prove a key tool in negating the reputational impact of the industry within surrounding communities.
Unlike other eco-efficiency technologies, SulNOx’s technology comes at no cost to the ship owner or operator’s bottom-line financials, aside from an initial license fee. SulNOx’s ongoing costs of emulsification are recouped from a share in the fuel savings generated by the technology, the percentage saving dependent upon factors that include vessel type, speed and age.