Asia's floating time bombs

In a world criss-crossed by seaborne trade, decisions in one region can have serious repercussions for others. The current voyage of the Russian tanker Geroi Sevastopolya, from Europe to Asia, is a case in point.

The vessel, carrying 50,000 metric tonnes of heavy fuel oil from Latvia to Singapore, was warned by Spain this week to stay several hundred kilometres away from the Spanish coast on its way south.

The European Union recently banned the Geroi Sevastopolya, and other heavy-oil carriers like it, from EU waters. With tougher rules on single-hull tankers now in place in Europe, it is likely they will become even more heavily engaged in carrying oil to Asia, where the breakneck pace of China's economic expansion is leading to a huge surge in oil imports. Some critics have likened old and badly maintained tankers to environmental time bombs. The Spanish government is still smarting from the public outcry when another tanker, the Prestige, broke in two in a winter storm just over a year ago and sank about 245 km off the northwestern coast of Spain, spilling much of its 63,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil into the sea. It fouled the Spanish coastline for months afterwards.

Like the Geroi Sevastopolya, the Prestige was en route to Singapore. Both tankers are well over 20 years old and have single steel hulls. Large modern tankers have double hulls, for added protection in case of rough weather, a collision or grounding.

In fact, over half of the world's 10,000 tankers are the old-style, single-hull variety despite outcries after every major oil spill in recent years, from the 1989 Exxon Valdez in pristine Alaska to the Erika, which went down off the west coast of France in 1999.

The Prestige sinking galvanised Europe's political leadership to take tough action. The European Union last October banned single-hull tankers from the ports, offshore installations and waters of its 15 member states if they were carrying heavy grades of oil.

Heavy fuel oil will not disperse or emulsify easily when treated with detergents to clean up a spill. And it tends to stick to the seafloor, resulting in the long-term contamination of shellfish beds and the closure of parts of fisheries around inlets where a lot of oil has settled.

Europe's strong-arm tactics prompted the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the United Nations agency responsible for setting global standards for shipping safety, to agree this month to bring forward by five years its deadline for phasing out single-hull tankers, to 2010 for most vessels.

The IMO also agreed that from 2005, heavy oils can only be carried in double-hull tankers of 5,000 deadweight tonnes and above. Smaller single-hull tankers that do not generally make long sea voyages can carry heavy oils until 2008. As a result, there are now glaring inconsistencies between EU and international rules for the tanker trade. This will inevitably push more single-hull vessels towards Asia, where the demand for imported oil is strongest.

Of course, not all old tankers are unsafe. The Geroi Sevastopolya was inspected and determined to be sound by a team from the European Maritime Safety Agency before it left Latvia on December 6.

Still, there have been some near-disasters from tanker collisions in Asian waters in recent years. In December last year, just a month after the Prestige went down, a single-hull tanker collided with a cargo ship at the eastern entrance to the Malacca and Singapore straits. Fortunately, the tanker sustained relatively minor damage and only about 350 tonnes of its 86,000 tonnes of crude oil spilled into the sea.

The migration of old tankers to the region before they are phased out by 2010 will increase the risk of a major oil spill.

The Malacca and Singapore straits are already among the world's busiest international waterways. Last year, an average of 45 tankers a day, carrying over 10 million barrels of oil, passed through these straits - a number projected to increase to nearly 60 per day by 2010 as demand for imported oil rises in northeastern Asia.

Michael Richardson, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The views expressed in this article are those of the author