The International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) fears ‘chaos and confusion’ unless the IMO resolves some serious issues about the successful implementation of the 2020 sulphur cap in marine fuel, which will come into effect on 1 January 2020.
Such chaos could affect the movement of the world’s energy, raw materials and manufactured products, which is about 90% of global trade being carried by sea.
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This was the main point of the Annual General Meeting of ICS’s member national shipowner associations which met in Hong Kong last week.
ICS Chairman Esben Poulsson mentioned:
Governments, oil refiners and charterers of ships responsible for meeting the cost of bunkers all need to understand that ships will need to start purchasing compliant fuels several months in advance of 1 January 2020. But at the moment no one knows what types of fuel will be available or at what price, specification or in what quantity. Unless everyone gets to grips with this quickly we could be faced with an unholy mess with ships and cargo being stuck in port.
ICS called governments to make significant progress on these issues at a critical IMO meeting in July about the upcoming global sulphur cap. ICS agreed to contribute to the development of additional IMO regulations that will have a direct impact on reducing international shipping’s CO2 emissions before 2023.
However, ICS members are disappointed with the European Union’s intention to put pressure on the implementation of a regional CO2 reporting system, despite having given an undertaking to align the MRV regulation with the global regime.
Mr. Poulsson added:
Anything less than a full alignment with the IMO CO2 data collection system will be seen as a sign of bad faith by many non-EU nations who recently agreed to the IMO GHG reduction strategy, precisely to discourage such unilateral measures which risk seriously distorting maritime trade and global shipping markets.
