The December 2nd edition of the Ship Repair Newsletter carried a very interesting viewpoint on the implementation of the 0.1% sulphur limit in Emission Control Areas (ECA). In particular our eye was caught by the claim from Interferry that 60% of ferries will find it either financially or physically impractical to retrofit sea water scrubbers. As you can imagine, our focus at Oceanox has been on ferries which operate within the North West European ECA and we have crawled around quite a few to make proposals.
Looking first at the physical barriers to retrofit, these tend to fall into one of three categories:
1. A lack of space - either to fit the scrubbers themselves or the ancillary equipment needed to run them.
2. A lack of power - most scrubbing systems do create a parasitic load and although in our case this is very low, some systems may demand power that the vessel does not have the capacity to cope with.
3. Lack of sea water capacity – sea water scrubbing systems do require a lot of reaction water and some ships may be limited in the size of their sea chests.
Our experience of visiting ferries has reinforced our belief that our design is suitable for retrofit to the majority of vessels. Our proposals include a full project plan including management of installation and as such we focus very hard on the detail of getting things fitted. We have found that because we are able to site the scrubbing equipment external to the funnel we have flexibility and indeed thus far have not had to impinge on revenue earning space to fit equipment. Engine rooms do get crowded over the life of a ship, but we are generally not looking for a lot of space, just enough to fit some pumps, pipe work and filters.
In terms of power, parasitic loads are around 1.5% of installed power, most notable is the reaction water supply pumps which do need to pump a large volume quite high in the ship and as such to require some oomph! Some thought must be given to starting procedures and electrical distribution, but in most cases these issues are not insurmountable.
The capacity of sea chests can of course be expanded, this does add cost, but when you are looking at the cost of compliant fuel as your justification, after 2015 this does become manageable.
The financial viability of retrofit installations is relatively easy to address. Up to now, investment decisions have been calculated against the variable differential between high and low sulphur residue. This differential is not structural and as such is a risky thing to calculate a financial return against. In 2015 however the picture changes dramatically when the compliant fuel option becomes distillate. Distillates have a long term structural differential against residue which is measured in the hundreds of dollars per ton. In most cases we see payback on investment in under two years when calculated using either current or predicted distillate differentials. This does mean that even quite old ships can make the case for retrofit installation.
When all is said and done, we do find that willingness to find a solution is a huge percentage of the battle. Ship operators have engineering teams with years of experience and our team includes skills from a range of ship repair, marine engineering and commercial disciplines. Given the mandate and a desire to find one the collaborative approach usually finds a solution.
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