Tanker group urges industry to focus on bunkering-related oil spills

A significant number of oil spills occur during the bunkering process when ships refuel at ports, more so than incidents related to cargo tankers, the managing director of Intertanko said, urging the shipping industry to focus on preventing such accidents.
Katharina Stanzel, managing director of the association of independent tanker owners, said companies should collaborate with governments on oil spill preparedness and response. She spoke a panel of the International Chemical and Oil Pollution Conference and Exhibition 2013 in Singapore.
About 1.7 spills measuring at least 700 mt happened worldwide each year between 2010 and 2012, Torben Skaanild, secretary general of shipping association BIMCO, said at the same panel. Most occurred during bunkering, while the rest were related to pipelines and other causes, he said.
While oil spills occurring during discharge or loading of oil tankers still happened more frequently, a significant number of incidents do occur during bunker fuel operations, according to data from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation's (ITOPF) website.
Spills are categorized by size: less than 7 mt, 7-700 mt and more than 700 mt. "The vast majority of spills are small," the federation said.
The industry has made improvements, according to ITOPF data. The annual number of large spills in the 1970s was eight times the rate for 2000-2009, when an average of about 3 large spills occur ed each year, the federation said.
For spills smaller than 7 mt, there were 564 incidents that took place during bunkering between 1974 and 2012 out of a total of 7,844 incidents, according to data on ITOPF's website.
The other reasons for spills not related to bunkering were categorized broadly into "loading/discharging," "other operations," and "unknown."
Richard H. Johnson, ITOPF's technical director, said at the conference that the IFO 380 CST grade of bunker fuel is a difficult substance to disperse in the water after a spill, making it hard to clean up using the typical dispersion or pumping methods used after other oil spills.
In the past, a ship might have had three different fuels onboard, to cater for voyages in deep sea, in emission-control areas, and for other operational power generation requirements, Skaanild said.
The shipping industry still faces other risks on the environmental and operational fronts, including sewage and garbage disposal, air pollution and ballast water management, he added.
Source: Platts