AHEAD of next week’s marine environment protection committee, Intercargo, the association for dry bulk vessel owners, has reiterated its belief that its members should not be forced to install expensive treatment systems for all their ballast operations.
The association says that many large bulk vessels deballast using what is commonly known as gravity discharge.
Tankers and bulk carriers are the largest sources of discharged ballast and the likely main source of invasive species. With large ballast water tanks they would often start the de-ballasting process by allowing the ballast to run out of the vessel under gravity before having to divert the water through pumps. Often it is a dry bulk vessel’s topside tanks that are emptied using gravity discharge.
The association says that the bulk carrier segment still faces critical challenges in complying with the convention, which comes into force in September and by being forced to install treatment systems the advantages of allowing ballast water to run freely out of the vessels would be lost.
Intercargo’s proposal is that the IMO allows dry bulk vessels to continue to use ballast water exchange for its topside tanks, while having treatment systems installed for their other ballast operations.
The convention was agreed at the IMO in 2004 but only comes into force this year as member states failed to sign up to the convention for a number of reasons, the main one being that there was no sufficient means of compliance.
It took a number of years following the convention being written for treatment systems to be developed and put through a type approval process. With a large number of systems now type approved however, the robustness of the type approval process has been called into question, raising additional concerns by shipowner groups who have been critical of the way the practical requirements of convention have been handled.
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