Last week’s Autocar magazine carried an article covering the emergence of a drive to reduce the impact of diesel fuelled vehicles. Essentially road diesel emits “small particulates”, which are harmful to human health, and have even prompted London Major Boris Johnson to propose doubling the London congestion charge for diesel vehicles. But why would this be pertinent in a blog devoted to marine emissions reduction?
Well, the implementation of IMO and EC regulation limiting the sulphur content of marine fuels in January next year will mean that in all practicality, the majority of ships using the Emissions Control Areas (ECA) will switch to Marine Gas Oil (MGO) which is derived from the same “middle distillate” refinery stream as road diesel. The human health impacting small particulates are present in both fuels. As is often the case, there is bitter irony in the emissions reduction legislation which unintentionally increases the emissions of harmful substances.
Vessels which fit post combustion exhaust gas cleaning equipment (scrubbers) can not only continue to consume the much cheaper residual fuel oil, but will remove the majority of particulate emissions as part of the scrubbing process.
So once again we see that scrubbing represents not only the most commercially viable means of compliance with sulphur emissions legislation, but also the most environmentally positive outcome.
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