Ship emission violators are being tackled in Europe thanks to sniffer drones.
Since the tightening of sulphur limits in Emission Control Areas (ECAs) in January of this year, regulators have struggled to enforce the rules, given the large area they have to police.
Ship owners have therefore voiced their concerns over the lack of a level playing field that has been created from dodging compliance. For example, ship operators that have invested millions of dollars in exhaust gas cleaning systems to remove engine pollutants may arrive at a competitive disadvantage if rival ships are passing through ECAs burning heavy fuel oil (HFO) and without cleaning technology, are not caught by regulators for being incompliant.
European officials have therefore decided to increase pollution measuring tools via the use of drones.
The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) and the European Space Agency are hoping to cooperate in tracking the pollution from ships sailing in some of Europe’s busiest waters: the English Channel, the North Sea, the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland.
Officials are still assessing what kind of drones they would need but EMSA indicated that an aircraft that could fly for at least four hours, have a 20km range and equipped with sulphur and CO2 sniffers, and feature ship identification beacons would be required. Drones would fly through a ship’s exhaust plume to measure sulphur emissions, allowing regulators to establish a ‘black list’ of violators.
Denmark has already installed sniffer sensors on the Great Belt Bridge, which connects the Danish islands of Funen and Zealand over one of Europe’s busiest routes where thousands of commercial ships pass under the bridge each year.
