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Ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea
- roscoe2020 7y agoThis exacerbates ocean acidification. Great. https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/ocean-acidification-exacerbated-emissions-ships-major-shipping-routes https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/news/ocean-acidification-exacerb...
- spdegabrielle 7y ago> the sulphur emitted by the ships is simply re-routed from the exhaust and expelled into the water around the ships, which not only greatly increases the volume of pollutants being pumped into the sea, but also increases carbon dioxide emissions. This should be a crime
- newguy1234 7y agoProbably hard to do in international waters but the bigger countries could always just say that any vessel doing this is blacklisted from docking in their ports. Every ship operator would just retrofit their vessels if that were to occur.
- cies 7y agoExactly. I was gonna say that by some international port blacklist we can easily punish them, and of force them to make a huuuuuge donation to a clean-up fund in order to have the ban lifted.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoNo way the free market has an invisible hand. That have is gonna show up one day and consumers are just going to love it. Promise. Any day now. /s
- delfinom 7y agoThe US and China have already defined rules to prevent it.
- mperham 7y agoAccording to the article, they've added rules that the ships can't discharge within their national waters. So the ships will discharge right outside that line. Nothing is prevented, only delayed.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>This should be a crime I suspect that a desire to cater to people with "something drastic must be done" attitudes is how we wound up with half baked rules with seemingly obvious loopholes in the first place. As another commenters pointed out, there are standards for discharge water and these systems presumably meet them. If you think those standards are wrong then take them up with them. The ship owners are acting in rational self interest within the letter of the law here. It's hard to find fault with that.
- jakelazaroff 7y agoThey are not acting in rational self interest with regard to the health of our planet, on which they too must live. I know — tragedy of the commons, etc, but it’s actually pretty easy for me to find fault with that.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoHow does the fact that they're acting in rational self-interest make it "hard to find fault"? "Rational self-interest" isn't a defense for bad behavior.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThey were given two options within the law and they picked the cheap one. Expecting participants in a commoditized industry to voluntarily increase their overhead is naive at best. The issue here is with the people writing the rules.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoThere's two points here. From a practical standpoint, clearly the way to fix this problem is to fix the rules, and educate the people who make them to minimize future occurrences. Expecting everyone to act for the good of society without zero material incentives or consequences is futile. I believe you're saying that, and I agree. But (by a reasonable understanding of "hard to find fault") you also appear to be saying that the people exploiting the loopholes in the faulty law are morally blameless, and that's nonsense. Humans are responsible for the consequences of their actions. It's naive to expect them to do the right thing, but that doesn't make them immune to criticism or judgment.
- seph-reed 7y agoCan we just start adding a piece to laws that says something like: "if you do something shifty to avoid this law, and we find out, it will be up to the court to decide if you were still breaking it" I really hate the notion that laws are far more about the word than the intent.
- aeternum 7y agoThis shifts much of the power from the legislature to the court. 'Something shifty' can be very broad.
- paulmd 7y agoSuch standards exist. For example, consider the laws around "structuring" financial transactions to avoid reporting requirements. You can get as creative as you want, it's all illegal, the crime is attempting to avoid the regulation and if you try it they will absolutely fuck your shit up. It is one of the most stringently enforced financial crimes and if you try it the feds will come down on you like a ton of bricks. Never, never attempt to structure financial transactions. One of the problems with legal discussions on this site is that we tend to apply programmer logic to legal problems like this and come up with loopholes. But ultimately the law is interpreted by humans. Judges deal with criminals who think they've found a clever loophole all day, every day.
- wereHamster 7y agoI guess the new law reads "Can't release sulphur into atmosphere", so the shipping companies were thinking of ways around that. Why not say "Can't release … into environment", which would cover air, sea, ground, space and everything else around us?
- markdown 7y agoThey definitely should dump it outside the environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- latchkey 7y agohttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-front-fell-off/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-front-fell-off/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirki_(tanker) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirki_(tanker)
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThere was need for a Snopes fact check for that? Strewth.
- markdown 7y agoLOL does Snopes fact-check skits now?
- cannonedhamster 7y agoBecause people will take jokes as reality. See Storm Area 51.
- Karunamon 7y agoIn which case it should be labeled as a joke, not "false". And Snopes has a satire tag for this purpose.
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- mogadsheu 7y agoShipping is a pretty dirty industry, because of fuel quality they use and the general lack of oversight in the middle of the ocean. I was on the board of Corvus Energy (http://corvusenergy.com http://corvusenergy.com) while working in Norway, whose technology reduces CO2, SOx, NOx, and fuel consumption by up to 30%. One installation was the equivalent of taking 10,000 cars off of the road. Thankfully, there are developments in this space. Bear in mind that shipping is also the most energy efficient form of bulk transportation (vs land or air).
- sdfmmkmsdfmk 7y agoIf it reduces fuel consumption by 30%, wouldn't all ships want to have it? Is it too expensive, or what is the problem?
- mogadsheu 7y agoShipping is a very conservative industry and hesitant to new things. Time to investment payback was longer than many companies were willing to stomach, which was shortened thanks to Norway subsidies. That said, they’re growing quickly, have a look!
- dogma1138 7y agoIn shipping the cost is transferred easily down the line; capital investment in new vessels and new technologies is pretty slim because of that. Also the time spent in dry dock might as well cost you more than what you’ll gain through the service time of the vessel since many of these vessels change hands frequently sometimes even several times a year. Also because how risk is managed in the shipping industry none of these companies is exposed to any actual action, the vessels would almost never be owned by an entity with actual assets and they would essentially be registered to shells holding only debt. This is done to protect shipping companies from damages in case of accidents but it’s also very convenient to avoid any regulation since if they are caught there will be no legal entity to pay the fine.
- esyir 7y ago
- seren 7y agoI was wondering what it would take to replace a current container ship by a sail boat, like a clipper. Apparently, each container ship has more or less a 100 times the tonnage of a clipper. Independently of the speed of the ships, the cost of the crews would probably kill the idea, except for goods with a very high margin, but there must a fuel price (including carbon tax) where this should become economically viable again.
- willvarfar 7y agoThere are lots of experiments and even production ships with sails these days. Google for "sails on container ships" for lots of nice pictures and articles. The sails don't look like historic sails - they are often rotors that look like cylinders. Maersk's Pelican, for example, is supposed to get 10% from its rotor sails. Tangent: why do wind turbines look so conventional, with their propellers? There is a lot online about vertical axis wind turbines etc, but I've never seen one.
- joaomacp 7y agoArticle from 2015: https://www.wired.com/2015/05/future-wind-turbines-no-blades https://www.wired.com/2015/05/future-wind-turbines-no-blades I guess they're still not feasible for some reason.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoI forget the details but vertical axis wind turbines are always less efficient than horizontal axis turbines. Off the top of my head I can't recall if the reason is that vertical axis turbines always have half of the rotor turning against the wind, but there is a basic reason I believe can be found on wikipedia.
- willvarfar 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_axis_wind_turbine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_axis_wind_turbine says > research at Caltech has also shown that a carefully designed wind farm using VAWTs can have an output power ten times that of a HAWT wind farm of the same size etc The cups on the normal wind speed sensor have less drag into the wind. It would be easy to imagine a VAWT where a computer knew the wind direction and feathered the blades on the back sweep etc?
- gigatexal 7y agoLet’s hope more and more exposure hits the industry so we can stop polluting our oceans.
- ptah 7y agoletter of the law solutions like this are outrageous
- sanxiyn 7y agoIf you want to read the other side's argument, here it is, from International Bunker Industry Association: https://ibia.net/facts-and-fears-in-the-open-loop-scrubber-debate/ https://ibia.net/facts-and-fears-in-the-open-loop-scrubber-d... The main point is that there is regulation for washwater based on science. The article describes "warm, acidic, contaminated washwater containing carcinogens including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals", but regulation in fact specifically includes standard for heavy metals, PAHs, and acidity. You should argue why acidity standard is wrong and what it should be, instead of repeating "acidic washwater".
- azinman2 7y agoI’d argue it should be zero. Ruining our oceans is something that cannot be undone, and there is far too much damage that has and is already occurring in acidifying our oceans and the amount of existing toxic materials. This industry is one of the dirtiest, and least responsible to the world.
- erdgdsgbdfsg 7y ago"I’d argue it should be zero." So would I, but that's impossible in meat space for any industry or technology spawned in the last 200 years. I wouldn't mind technologically winding the clock back 200 years, using sail boats and letting my computer wither away (and livelihood, btw). Would you? "This industry is one of the dirtiest, and least responsible to the world." True. It's also, by weight and value of goods transported, one of the cleanest. It's a massive industry Ships have the advantage of being able to dump waste in the middle of the ocean where there is little to no life (too deep, no light, no plants. There is some life). Compared to what other, land based, industries do this is comparatively benign. Here the waste gets diluted by an essentially infinite sink. Infinite sink you scoff? Yes, depending on where and what you dump. If you dump brine water off the coast near the Mississippi river, you're doing a lot of damage by significantly changing the salinity locally. Slowly dump the same brine in the middle of the ocean, and nothing will happen. Similar for heavy metals. These dissolve into salt water, and were already present in solution since the dawn of time. We won't change those numbers significantly. (again, assuming you're not dumping it just off of land like the Japanese did in the 50s) Plastic is a different ball game. Plastic doesn't dissolve and is carried, and concentrated by ocean currents. That's nasty. Chemicals and isotopes that don't naturally exist are also nasty. Particularly if they have long half-lives.
- niceworkbuddy 7y agoI wonder what Captain's Nemo story could have been today...
- contingencies 7y agoDidn't read the article but I met a Danish fellow doing laser prop shaft alignment on Friday night in Shenzhen. He told me there are packed out waiting lists for the installation of these devices right around China right now. Until then, I'd never heard of them.
- Overtonwindow 7y agoShipping is a very under-regulated industry. Not just on environmental issues but also labor and human rights. Check out the book “Ninety Percent of Everything” by Rose George, all about the shipping industry.
- thedogeye 7y agoIt’s not a “cheat” device. The law allows ship operators to use it and dump the sulfur into the ocean. Pure madness.
- mperham 7y agoIt's a cheat device in that it skirts the intent of a law: that sulfur not get into the environment at all but extracted and disposed of properly.
- spanktheuser 7y agoWhen can we start imprisoning people for this sort of activity? It’s clear that fines are a non-functioning solution in a capitalist system as they are subject to cost-shifting to future leadership / shareholders / society. Within our industry I’ve sat in entirely too many meetings where executives removed basic security investments from the roadmap over the objections of engineering. They understood the risks of doing so; they merely concluded that the personal consequences were both small and unlikely. It seems to me that our current regulatory framework will remain untenable until enforcement has a very sobering deterrent effect.
- Neil44 7y agoYou can imprison people when you make it against the law.
- throwaway391503 7y agoThe solution is nuclear-powered ships.
- rndgermandude 7y agoIt's hard enough to secure nuclear power plants. Now imagine a swimming one blew up (by accident, or deliberately) in some water highway, like the street of hormuz, and cause a traffic stop for weeks or even months.
- aledalgrande 7y agoIf Thorium reactors ever get completed... this won't be a problem.
- manfredo 7y agoNine nuclear submarines have sunk so far. They did not release significant amounts of radiation. Sinking a reactor generally does not lead to compromise of the containment, singe pressures are higher in the reactor as compared to its surroundings. Sinking reduces the pressure gradient. One would probably have to puncture the reactor to experience a catastrophic event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submari...
- rndgermandude 7y agoLike you said: The submarines sunk. The reactors did not blow up. Now think about what happens when one on a container ship actually blows up (e.g. because the ship was attacked to make it blow up), and also consider the different scale of a container ship to a nuclear sub, which of course means you need a different size reactor.
- manfredo 7y agoProbably the same thing as what happens when an aircraft carrier blows up. Actually, probably less violent because aircraft carriers are also carrying jet fuel and ordnance. And we send those into warzones, nobody seems to mind.
- eatbitseveryday 7y agoWhy don’t we pay ships for the pollutants they collect? Wouldn’t that motivate them to store it?
- hapidjus 7y agoBecause that would give them a reason to pollute even more.
- onemoresoop 7y agoWhat difference does it make if they collect it though? Yes, they'd claim a bit more but can't claim too much because the storage is limited to some extent. It'd still be better for the environment.
- kube-system 7y agoIt is neither feasible nor practical to collect everything that comes out of a hydrocarbon-burning ship's exhaust. We have scrubbing for some of the worst stuff, but there's plenty of stuff that isn't collected. When you burn fuel, you get a mix of those emissions. If burning fuel results in X amount of sulfur and Y amount of CO2, you still don't want to increase the amount of X, even if 100% of it is collected, because Y will also go up and it isn't being collected.
- JackRabbitSlim 7y agoBlah that's hard and costs the rich some profits; lets talk about customers using plastic straws and eating beef instead! We have products we can sell them for that stuff! A financial collapse is the only thing that will prevent an ecological collapse. World War 3 is the planets best hope.
- mikelyons 7y agoBe careful what you wish for, this solution also includes the second American Civil War and assassination of high ranking government officials.
- defterGoose 7y agoGee, even as an American I'm kind of hoping for that with reckless abandon!
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoOT: what an amazingly unreadable web page on mobile. I’m using my work phone and have no blocker installed and this is horrible.
- clacke2 7y agoI'm reading it on Firefox Klar/Focus in reader mode, no plugins, and it looks great!
- tathougies 7y agoThere are a number of problems with this accusation. (1) The requirement is that the sulphur is not released into the air. This is the rule adopted by a standards body. Why exactly is it cheating to dump it into the ocean instead? (2) It is unclear that this is a bad thing. The article only cited the danger of dumping the chemicals in a port, where concentrations could reach dangerous levels due to concentration. It is unclear that dumping in the open ocean would be bad (3) The final charge is that the scrubber increases CO2 output. It is unclear how one should get around this. Obviously, any process that requires more energy releases more CO2. There is no data given as to whether open loop or closed loop scrubbers generate more CO2. I'm guessing both generate some more CO2. The fact of the matter is that the regulation as stated requires more CO2 to be produced. The regulations mandate extra energy use, so the extra greenhouse gases produced are directly due to the regulations, not the companies behind this. In other words, the article is written as if to accuse the companies of breaking the law, but in reality, the companies are simply complying with the standards in a way the author does not like. Instead of calling for standards to be changed, the author is acting as if companies should magically know what to do. Standards bodies exist in order to create standards that companies can follow. They should be the ones implementing the rule change. Indeed, the article explicitly mentions that the IMF explicitly allows these kinds of scrubbers. Thus, using them is not even air quotes cheating. It's actually fully compliant. To the article's credit, they did point out that the standards body is indeed reviewing their rules, and should be able to figure something out in the coming months.
- rini17 7y agoNo magic necessary here. Companies know very well that releasing sulphur and heavy metals into the environment, regardless if air or water, is harmful. It was scientifically proven that heavy metals tend to concentrate in the food chain. They could switch to refined (low sulfur) oil tomorrow, that is not a technical problem. But, as others explain, the ownership of shipping companies is structured to avoid any direct responsibility, so voluntary decision that goes against the inertia is hard, and regulation is difficult in international waters.
- tathougies 7y ago
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- nyxtom 7y agoMaybe just have these ships run on Methanol. Seems like the obvious long term solution. https://www.methanex.com/news/industry-welcomes-four-new-ocean-going-vessels-capable-running-methanol https://www.methanex.com/news/industry-welcomes-four-new-oce...
- hackermang 7y agoYet another reason to import less crap from China.
- sanne 7y agoBit of context on what they call IMO 2020 regulation. TLDR: this is regulation that moves us towards a cleaner and more environmentally friendly industry, but it's a small step in a larger effort to make shipping environmentally friendly. Couple of questions to answer: 1. What is IMO 2020, and what is the intent of the law? 2. How can shipping lines comply? And how is it enforced? 3. How disruptive is this for the industry? 4. Does this help us as a society? 1. IMO 2020 is regulation to reduce the amount of sulphur in the exhaust gasses of all vessels. It's a landmark achievement by an international organization (International Maritime Office) to ensure the world has signed up for this. 2. Shipping lines (and this includes all vessels) can comply in multiple ways (in order of use): 1. Use low sulphur diesel which is much more expensive than what they use now, 2. Install scrubbers (or what this article calls cheat devices) to scrub the sulphur out. There are 2 type of scrubbers: open and closed. The open one is called "cheating device" as it scrubs sulphur from the bunker, but dumps it via an open connector with sea water in sea. The closed one collects the sulphur so it can be safely disposed. It is questionable whether the open devices are net positive on the world, and different studies show different results. 3) use LNG. Most ports have indicated that they will only allow vessels that comply. Some countries, mostly developing nations, have already indicated that compliance is not needed, but all major ports on the East-West trades will comply and therefore it will impact most of cargo flows. 3. This will be very disruptive. There is now all of a sudden too much high sulphur bunker, and too little diesel. Price spread will increase rapidly when we approach January 1st 2020. Cargo will become more expensive. That said, refiners will benefit as well power generation in countries where they don't care about sulphur. Refiners will make more money on low sulphur diesel as diesel prices will go up (more demand), power generators in mostly developing nations will buy the sulphuric bunker to lower their fuel costs. 4. Yes, it does help. It’s a small step towards 2050, which is target for IMO to decarbonize the industry. This is an industry with long and large asset cycles, and change therefore is slow. So: is the device cheating? No it’s perfectly allowed. Only a smaller share of all vessels will use, and most others will shift to low sulphur diesel. So it should be net positive for the world. This is how we look at it at Flexport.