EMEA News
IMO 2020: Denmark's Emissions Monitoring Points Way to Effective Compliance
Making the upcoming "IMO 2020" 0.5% sulfur rule work is a major concern of shipowners and developments in emissions control areas (ECA) are showing how compliance can be made effective .
Niels Bjørn Mortensen writing on the Passengership Technology website said that several European Union states within the [Baltic Sea] ECA have performed fly-overs with airplanes to examine ships’ fumes.
Using helicopters and drones, Danish technology firm Explicit has carried out ship emissions monitoring on behalf of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency for over a year. The results are encouraging as evaluation shows 96.5% of all measurements as high-quality while 92-97% of the vessels checked were compliant, depending on geographic location.
"This method of monitoring might be considered more efficient than the use of permanent sniffers, simply because most ship crew will be aware of where permanent sniffers are located, whereas they could never know when a plane or a drone would appear," Mortensen said.
"In fact, the results show a generally higher SOx content far from shore than under the Great Belt Bridge, implying that some ships change to compliant fuel before passing under the bridge."
However, Mortensen cautioned that "results obtained by these methods are only indicative and are not likely to be used as evidence in court".
The Finnish Meteorological Institute has tried monitoring emissions via satellite but with limited success. Average SOx content in the air over a large area can be measured but not the level of SOx emissions from a specific source, according to Mortensen.
The European Commission has issued guidelines on airborne monitoring called Best Practices Airborne Marpol Annex VI Monitoring, under the Compliance Monitoring (CompMon) project.
