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Dutch IGCC pioneers chalk up pain and gain Emergency response is behind schedule in the European public sector A new refining industry in Europe's Asian Corridor Commission proposes milestone energy proposal Replace fuel oil with distillate? Cancelled projects will sustain margins “Marine distillate not fuel oil from 2010” Branson's biofuels megastore You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway Buncefield 2: Investigation critical Where now for Swedish Class 1 diesel My slow awakening to climate change The luckiest motorist alive Safety row goes on over Europe's largest LNG terminal New WHO guidelines on city air quality put focus on diesel Would LNG really 'evaporate harmlessly' in an accident? Another lesson in the thermobaric bomb Spare a thought for the oil-rich But will the good times keep on rolling? Carbon storage and the zero emissions refinery Everything just changed E85 and high octane gasolines The problem of small-minded young engineers New Permit Regulations Biodiesel newbuilds and a new green superfuel Spilled wine and our split industry Drilling down into the prospects for IGCC The beginning of the start of the end of oil | Tanker association: “Marine distillate not fuel oil from 2010” My friend who runs an oil tanker business has just heard from his trade organisation that they've made a submission in a working group that high sulphur and low sulphur fuel oil should be replaced by a new clean marine distillate by 2010. At today's prices the change would double the cost of fuelling his family's rather substantial fleet at every port in the world. The association is Intertanko, whose members are independent owners and operators of oil and product tankers. They have found themselves under increasing pressure to absorb capital and operating costs and costs for the abatement of emissions on board ship. With revisions to an important international air pollution treaty raining in from interest groups, many calling for exhaust aftertreatment, the association felt that fuel quality was being neglected. Specifically, Intertanko is proposing a global marine distillate specification with 1% sulphur from 2010 and, for new ships, 0.5% sulphur from 2015. As I write a tonne of high sulphur fuel oil (HSFO) costs around $275. LSFO costs $295. A marine diesel comparable with what Intertanko is suggesting is hard to put a price on. Similar fuels cost $500 per tonne. So you can well imagine the reaction of my friend who today can fuel his tanker fleet with HSFO or LSFO. Or can you? Have a go (answer in four paragraphs from now). On the face of it, the notion of ships using distillate alone and no resid is, of course, quite impossible. There aren’t the molecules, there aren’t the units, there isn’t the hydrogen, there is no handy glut of distillate – quite the opposite, and, even if there were the contractors, which there aren't, one might well ask: "Is there the crude oil?" But here's why this idea cannot be dismissed out of hand. Firstly, how did the tanker operator react to a potential doubling of his fuel costs? “This is the best thing Intertanko has said in 20 years,” he said. “We were thinking of leaving the association,” his sister added. They’re not thinking of leaving the association now. You’re entitled to ask, how can this be so? Isn't it a universal law that customers never tolerate fuel increases? We need some background, and then we'll return in a subsequent column to the considerable refinery-side issues. The high seas have not seen quite the same development in environmental practices as the European high street. While people here are still a bit sniffy about diesel road fuels with 7ppm sulphur content (PM still being a major policy concern), a ship can ply most European waters on a fuel containing up to 45000ppm sulphur. Whereas, the open sewer principle of throwing the ‘night water’ from upper floor balconies into the street below is to my knowledge a thing of the past in Europe, it’s still a common practice to dispose of the two or three per cent of refinery residue that is not combustible in a ship’s engines by pouring it into the open sea. Since some governments keep planes in the air to spot this operational waste disposal, this is apparently best done on a cloudy, windy day while surveying the horizon with your neck craned at about a 45 degree angle. By 2020 ships in European waters will account for more air pollution than all land sources in the region combined. That includes SOx, NOx and PM. These pollutants are seen as important locally, coastally, as having global public health effects and, in the case of NOx, as a precursor to greenhouse gases. Thus, the gaze of policy makers has fallen gradually on marine fuels and marine emissions. Where mud sludge discharges are concerned, the oil, marine fuels and shipping industry doesn’t bear scrutiny well. Germany alone estimates it spends EUROS 20m a year on air surveillance operations to reduce oily water discharges which may be in the order of several hundred thousand tonnes a year in the North Sea alone. Nobody really knows. With all this going on, a slumbering if so-far somewhat ineffectual giant has awoken. Ever since anyone could remember, the IMO had been tortuously developing an international treaty to bring the shipping and marine fuels industry out of the dark ages. With EU legislation suddenly in sight, and west coast America watching developments closely, a number of progressive parties suddenly found they were able to rally support to ratify Annex Six of the Marine Pollution (MARPOL) Treaty, which governs air pollution from ships. They caught the world off-guard. It entered into force on May 19 2005, one year later bringing into effect the first Sulphur Oxide Emissions Control Area in the Baltic Sea. By now the EU Marine Fuels Directive had enshrined the SECA concept and included provision for a further August 2007 introduction of a SECA governing the North Sea. In these SECA areas ships may use only fuels with a low sulphur content of 1.5% wt sulphur, or employ as-yet-uncommercialised onboard emissions scrubbing. California, meanwhile, has begun a long-anticipated tightening of its rules. By 24 miles from the coast, diesel electric and auxiliary engines must be using a fuel with a maximum sulphur content of 0.5%. And it’s in that context, with a plethora of regional rules and legislation before it, that Intertanko felt it had to change the nature of the debate. “Engines that are installed on board a ship are there for 25 years and it’s very hard to get them changed,” says Dragos Rauta, Technical Director of Intertanko. LSFO is predicted to rise sharply in price, while ship operators can reduce maintenance, spare parts replacement and fuel consumption when they run on diesel, he says. “Until the 1950s, that’s what they all did,” he adds. Intertanko has had to face some criticism from within its own ranks for its stand, with other members vocally enthusiastic for a new look at fuel quality. Upping the ante further, his colleague at the association, Bill Box adds: “The public, the politicians, the environmentalists, the media – in fact the world is quite simply no longer able to accept that ships continue to burn the oil industry's dirty residual fuel anywhere, either close to shore, or in mid ocean. “Failing to recognise this means shipowners ploughing on with burning dirty residual fuel and scrubbing the exhaust, with the added responsibility of disposing of the scrubbing residues.” | |||||||
Download Energy Industry Resumé with work samples Profile: Tim Lloyd Wright MA Here you'll find a brief profile of my work with international energy, transport and associated environmental issues. Energy trends articles You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway From the archive... Over-processed fuel leaves oil tankers adrift | ||||||||
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