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Defiant carriers ignore low-sulphur fuel rule to undercut forward rates

SIGNS of defiance rather than compliance over the use costly low-sulphur fuel are surfacing as the compliant complain that the defiant are gaining forward contracts because they charge less by using cheaper bunker fuel.

"If owners are beginning to lose cargoes because competitors were using the regulations to offer cheaper freight prices, then the problem needs to be solved now," said Jan-Fritz Hansen, vice president of the Danish Shipowners Association.

He urged the immediate provision of serious threats of detentions, thus depriving owners of their vessels.

But the UN's International Maritime Organisation (IMO) regulations don't apply until 2015 and enforcement is expected to be spotty as the rewards for defiance are great and penalties are small.

With global warming fading as a fashionable fear, and as air quality improves in zones where more stringent measures apply, much of the something-must-be-done urgency has drained away.

No one was available from the European Commission to comment on any further developments of guidelines for port state enforcement of the 2015 sulphur regulations ahead of this story being published, reported Lloyd's List.

The Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control said any inspections will be entered into its database as usual, but there had been no discussions of a concentrated enforcement campaign as its member states were both inside and outside the ECA (emissions control area) region, said its report.

The Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure and Environment said there would be increased inspections, sniffing and sampling as tests for compliance, but action would be taken on a case-by-case basis.

The rules will require all ships operating inside an emission control area either to use a fuel with a sulphur content of 0.1 per cent or to produce emissions of an equivalent low level.

That means they will have to use fuel that costs $300 per tonne more expensive than bunker, or spend millions of dollars installing an exhaust-gas cleaning scrubber or converting the vessel to run off liquefied natural gas.