At its 70th session (MEPC 70), the IMO agreed that a 0.5 percent global sulphur cap on marine fuel will be implemented from 1 January 2020, much earlier than the previously proposed date of 2025.<\/p>\n
This decision, required under regulation 14 of MARPOL Annex VI, is in line with an official assessment on fuel availability \u2013 conducted by a CE Delft-led consortium \u2013 and provides much needed clarity to ship owners.<\/p>\n
“This is a landmark decision and we are very pleased that the world has bitten the bullet and is now tackling poisonous sulfuric fuel in 2020,” said Bill Hemmings of Transport and Environment.<\/p>\n
“This decision reduces the contribution of shipping to the world\u2019s air pollution impact from about 5% down to 1.5% and will save millions of lives in the coming decades.”<\/p>\n
The industry now has just over three years to decide on their compliance measures, which can be either low-sulphur fuel, the installation of exhaust gas cleaning systems or the use of alternative fuels such as LNG.<\/p>\n
It was also agreed that the MEPEC will ask its Pollution Prevention and Response (PPR) subcommittee to consider implementation of the global cap, including enforcement and operational concerns.<\/p>\n
Consumption of LNG, both in LNG carriers that use the boil-off cargo for propulsion and in ships with LNG engines, is projected to increase from 8 million tonnes in 2012 to 11 to 13 million tonnes in 2020.<\/p>\n
Scrubbers are projected to be installed on 3,800 ships, collectively consuming 14-38 million tonnes of heavy fuel oil.<\/p>\n
In response to the news, the Maersk Group tweeted: \u201cGlobal regulations will help create a level playing field for the shipping industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alongside this, the next two NOx NECAs that have been decided are the Baltic Sea and the North Sea.<\/p>\n
The two NECAs, which were the subject of applications seeking simultaneous designation, will be enforced a year later than the sulphur cap from 1 January 2021.<\/p>\n
Ships with keels laid after that date will be required to meet dramatically reduced NOx emission limits, requiring either exhaust gas after treatment (selective catalytic reduction or exhaust gas recirculation) or use of LNG.<\/p>\n
The new NECAS will become the second batch to be enforced globally, after the North American and Caribbean NECAs were established on 1 January 2016.<\/p>\n
Delegates representing the Baltic and North Sea applications presented summaries of impact and cost-benefit analyses during a lunchtime session at the MEPC meeting earlier this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The International Maritime Organisation\u2019s Marine Environment Protection Committee has agreed on a global 0.5% sulphur cap and established the next two NOx Emission Control Areas (NECAs).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4857,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-4856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-regulation-policy-greenport"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4858,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4856\/revisions\/4858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4856"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=4856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}