Time’s Up

There’s no shortage of companies now approved to check that monitoring plans are fit for purpose, and there’s also no shortage of systems being approved for use by Vessel operators needing to collect the data.

In a matter of days, the next deadline passes for the European Union’s rules for ship monitoring reporting and verification of CO2 emissions, that for having vessel specific monitoring plans in place and having them verified.

If you are an owner or operator of a vessel that will eventually come to a European port once the regions MRV system is in full swing, this deadline on August 31 is not a worry, as you will have until two months after your first European port call under the system to submit your plan.

Annual emission data, related to voyages to, from and between European ports, has to be submitted annually. This data has also to be verified by an accredited verification body.

The data must be submitted into the European Maritime Safety Agency’s newly created THETIS MRV reporting portal, and will be then made public.

So the fuel data for each and every ship’s European voyages will be easy to find. Environmental groups are happy with this, ship owner snot so.

Dealing with non-compliance to European rules is usually left up to individual member state, so penalties for not submitting a monitoring plan on time, or for not having verified data submitted annually will vary.

A verification body is one that has been accredited by one of the European national accreditation bodies. These accreditation organisations are national organisations such as UKAS in the UK and DAkkS in Germany. They are members of the European Co-Operation of Accreditation.

Most of the accredited verifiers are the classification societies, although there are some others such as Verifavia in France and Cyprus’s Dromon Bureau of Shipping.

Some of these are certified to accredit for the compliance of the monitoring plans, the actual data submitted annually and any equipment or system that is used in the collation of the data.

International shipowners, not normally associated with Europe, but with vessels over 5,000 gt that will enter European ports need to comply with the rules.

A little ticker on the Verifavia home page shows how many vessels it has contracts to verify the monitoring plans or annual data for. As of reporting this it stood at 1350.Verifiavia has been one of the most fervent promoters of its services as a verifier, having originally started as a verification body approved to attest land based and aviation  CO2 reporting under the European emission trading scheme (a scheme which some believe should include shipping).

Class society DNV GL has been selling its ability to act as a verifier of shipborne data under the European rules, but also under the similar data collection requirements that come in force a year later under the IMO rules.

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