Baird Maritime editorial – November 2011
I recently spent a few very interesting days in sunny Barcelona as a participant in the excellent INTERFERRY Conference. INTERFERRY is the global trade association for the owners and operators of all kinds of ferries both large and small. It thus provides us with a really good overview of a large sector of the shipping industry internationally.
During the course of the conference it quickly became obvious that the big issues facing ferry owners are emissions, safety and manning. All of these involve greater regulation and government interference generally.
Most government interference is well-intentioned and developed in response to a perceived public demand. This is particularly so in Europe where the government of the European Union (EU) is a classic example of a "knee jerk" responder. Unfortunately, the reality is that whatever regulations are developed in the EU, they are rapidly mimicked in most other liberal democracies including the United States. This, perhaps is why INTERFERRY has now established a full-time liaison office in Brussels.
The resulting EU regulations that are inspired by this perceived public demand are often neither practical nor workable. They can be very time consuming and expensive to adhere to.
Worse, they often inspire the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which always wants to be seen to be doing the right thing, to globalise these policies.
No one at INTERFERRY appeared to be an overt climate change sceptic. Indeed, there seemed to be unanimous agreement that much needed to be done to reduce both fossil fuel consumption and its resulting emissions, even if only on economic grounds.
The problem, of course, as in most fields of human activity, is how to achieve those reductions both economically and practically. All the currently popular responses were canvassed. Slower steaming, more efficient hull shapes, LNG fuels, lighter vessels, more efficient turnarounds, methanol and DME fuels, and electrical propulsion.
A combination of some or all of those possible solutions will probably be the future course of the industry – it may even be nuclear power as canvassed elsewhere in this issue (Page 60).
Whatever happens, though, will be accompanied by a very heavy bureaucratic burden of ever-increasing regulation. Potential new rules were highlighted, especially those based on the dreaded EEDI (Energy Efficiency Design Index) which has been proposed as an efficiency regulation methodology. As described at INTERFERRY, the regulators may as well be speaking Martian as they explain EEDI's incredibly complex formula.
This really epitomises the crux of the problem. Regulation becomes
increasingly complex, esoteric and expensive to the point where compliance becomes practically impossible.
The world's regulators, particularly those in the EU and IMO need to take a cold shower and return to reality. Pure cold hard economics will force better environmental solutions and safety improvements than ever more complex regulation will ever do.
Neil Baird
