Green revolution for the world’s shipping fleet comes not a moment too soon

While most of the global warming militancy has quite reasonably been vented on cars, planes, coal and power plants, the tawdry truth about pollution in the shipping industry has attracted increasing attention, not least in Hong Kong, which has one of the world’s busiest ports and owns about 3 per cent of the world’s ships.

Global warming and carbon dioxide emissions are just one of the shipping industry’s problems – and not the most immediate one at that. Since the 1960s, shippers have been doing the world’s oil refiners a favour by taking off their hands the viscous black sludge – literally the dregs of the barrel – that remains after diesel, petrol and other lighter fuels have been refined away. Dense in sulphur, particulates and other nasty residues, this unpleasant gloop is heated up by shippers and burnt out on the open oceans. No one has cared very much until the ships come close to port. No one recognised back in the 1960s that carbon dioxide emissions were a problem even when they were coming from a ship 1,000km from land.

The IMO rule, taking effect on January 1 next year, limits the sulphur content in bunker fuel to 0.5 per cent – from a current average of 3.5 per cent. Panic has spread through the world’s oil markets. What to do with the residual gloop that for so many decades the shipping industry has taken off their hands? The price of this stuff is expected to fall by perhaps 60 per cent or more. If ships switch to diesel or other lighter fuels used by cars, trucks and planes, what is the likely impact on these global fuel markets, and on the fuel bills of airlines and truckers? As one oil industry analyst noted last week, “the oil market still feels strangely paralysed by indecision”.