Tuesday, March 31, 2009
North American waters set to become largest emissions control area
Rajesh Joshi - Tuesday 31 March 2009
US ratified Marpol Annex VI last year, which made the IMO statute the law of the land. pic: AP
NORTH America’s coastal waters are poised to become the world’s biggest ‘Emissions Control Area’.
If approved by the International Maritime Organisation, the bold new plan would require all ships engaged in international trades that either call at ports or transit the designated zone to use very low sulphur fuel oil.
The joint proposal put forward to the IMO by the US and Canada seeks to create a consolidated ECA stretching 200 nautical miles off the coast of either nation.
Establishment of such a consolidated ECA would automatically render state-level pollution controls, such as the 24-mile regime California sought to introduce last year, irrelevant.
“This is huge,” said Dennis Bryant, US maritime regulatory consultant. “This might spark interest from Mexico to join in. Only if the South American bloc were to come up with its own ECA proposal, we might see another ECA of comparable size.
Otherwise, this would be the biggest ECA in the world, by a distance.”
The US ratified Marpol Annex VI last year, which made the IMO statute the law of the land.
A formal US application to designate an ECA was widely expected, with Mr Bryant himself making that prediction at last week’s Green Ship conference organised by Lloyd’s List in Germany.
However, the expectation was that parts of the country, especially California, would be put forth as intended ECAs.
The fact that all seaboards in not just the US but also Canada have emerged as the ECA is impressive, Mr Bryant said.
Adding Canada to the mix is consistent with the IMO’s preference for a more regional rather than national approach to ECAs.
The US-Canadian proposal aims at reducing sulphur in fuel by 98%, particulate matter emissions by 85%, and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80% from the current global requirements.
To achieve these reductions, ships must use fuel with no more than 1,000 parts per million sulphur, or 0.1% beginning in 2015, and new ships must use advanced emission control technologies beginning in 2016.
The proposal does not extend to the US Pacific territories, the western unpopulated Hawaiian Islands, the US territories of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the Aleutian Islands, Western Alaska and the Canadian Arctic.
The arrival of the consolidated North American ECA would add to the existing ECAs in Europe, in the Baltic and the North Sea.
These ECAs do not have as wide a reach as the 200-mile reach of the North American ECA.
The US-Canadian proposal has chosen to go with the maximum 200-mile limit because “ship pollution travels great distances, [and] much of the inland population is also affected by ship emissions and will benefit from the cleaner air made possible by ECA fuel and engine controls … for example, pollution from ships travels as far as Dallas, Texas”.
Mr Bryant said a possible complaint on this score is that since prevailing winds in the US blow from West to East, requiring a ship, engaged in an international voyage, say, 190 miles east of New York or Boston to burn cleaner fuel, would be on over-reach.
However, Mr Bryant does not believe many international routes that do not call in North America exist in that corridor east of the US and Canada, so any such complainants might be seen as quibblers.
As established in Marpol Annex VI, an ECA designation is intended to prevent and reduce the adverse impacts on human health and the environment in areas that can demonstrate a need to prevent, reduce, and control emissions of NOX, SOX, and PM.
The US-Canadian proposal goes to great lengths to provide demographic statistics in support of the stated need for a giant North American ECA. Some 93,000 ships call at 100 ports in the two nations, and making them clean up their fuels is paramount in preserving the health of the North American population, the document states.
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