Seacurus Daily: Top Ten Maritime News Stories 12/11/2018

Seacurus Daily: Top Ten Maritime News Stories 12/11/2018

1. Enclosed Space Campaign
InterManager has launched a campaign to encourage seafarers to think about safety when working in enclosed spaces and to identify measures to reduce risks. Captain Kuba Szymanski, InterManager Secretary General, said: “The shipping industry has produced a wealth of rules, procedures, guidelines, leaflets etc concerned with the risks of working in enclosed spaces aboard vessels and yet seafarers are still dying…We want to hear from the seafarers themselves to find out why fatal mistakes are still being made? Are we missing a trick here? Is there something we haven’t taken into consideration?”
http://bit.ly/2PVcWsQ

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2. Bulker In Flames
A fire erupted on the 1984-built handy bulker Golden Ocean off Indonesia on Saturday and 22 crewmembers have been evacuated from the ship. The fire started in the engine room when the vessel was in ballast near Bontang, Indonesia. The vessel sent a distress signal to the local maritime safety authority which sent several firefighting tugs to the scene and managed to put out the fire and evacuated all the crew from the ship. No injuries were reported from the incident.
http://bit.ly/2QArFXu

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3. Duck Boat Deaths
The captain of the duck boat that sank at Table Rock Lake last summer, resulting in the deaths of 17 people, was indicted by a federal grand jury. Kenneth Scott McKee, 51, of Missouri, was charged in a 17-count indictment. McKee was the captain of Stretch Duck 7, operated by Ripley Entertainment, Inc. The indictment charges McKee with misconduct, negligence or inattention to duty by a ship’s officer, resulting in the death of another person. McKee is charged with one count for each of the 17 passengers (including one crew member) who died when Stretch Duck 7 sank on July 19, 2018.
http://bit.ly/2Fhamtb

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4. Afghanistan Shipping Dream
Landlocked Afghanistan is to form a shipping line to ship goods to India from the Iranian port of Chabahar. In multiple local reports the Afghan ministry of transportation was reported as saying the ships would fly the Afghan flag and the new entity would be operated as a private concern. Chabahar port, which has been on the drawing board for the past decade, is a trilaterial development between Iran, India and Afghanistan, located n southeastern Iran, on the Gulf of Oman giving Afghanistan an alternative ocean exit to existing Pakistani links.
http://bit.ly/2T4IlYP

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5. New York Wind Vision
New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has issued a solicitation seeking 800MW or more of new offshore wind projects for the state. The offering, issued by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is an an initial step towards the government’s goal of 2,400MW of offshore wind by 2030. Cuomo has set a mandate for 50 percent of the state’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030. Offshore wind is expected to bring an estimated $6 billion of investments to New York that will support approximately 5,000 new jobs in manufacturing, installation and operation.
http://bit.ly/2RUKkh5

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6. Bad Smell About Sewage
The IMO’s MARPOL Annex IV Convention aims at the “Prevention of pollution by sewage from ships.” Installing an approved sewage treatment plant has been a popular option. The MEPC has developed Guidelines on sewage treatment plant effluent standards and performance test specifications. However, in the absence of an effective enforcement regime, the vast majority of the sewage treatment plants installed are “discharging virtually untreated sewage”. To make matters worse, some approved plants do not conform, and in some cases, do not even conform to environmental science and engineering principles.
http://bit.ly/2z5QhjX

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7. Tankers Primed for Better Days
After a long time in the doldrums, the tanker market is primed for better days, as a result of a projected increase in ton-mile demand and various factors coming into play, from the sanctions on Iran, to the US-China trade war. Meanwhile, the product tanker market could also stand to benefit in the medium-term, as a result of the looming IMO 2020 rules and a series of changes of consumption habits in Asian countries. The IEA outlook for 2019 has been revised down by 100,000 b/d, while Vitol figures are twice that much”, the shipbroker said.
http://bit.ly/2K01BCM

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8. Banks Eschew Shipping
As banks continue to distance themselves from the shipping sector, two of Germany’s prominent lenders – Commerzbank and Nord/LB – have announced further reductions in their shipping portfolios. Commerzbank’s ship finance portfolio was run down further this year and stood at a volume of EUR1.1 billion (USD1.25 billion) at the end of the third quarter. This represents a reduction of EUR3.1 billion (USD3.52 billion) from the EUR4.2 billion (USD4.77 billion) at the end of the third quarter in 2017. Meanwhile, Nord/LB has focused on reducing its non-performing loan (NPL) shipping portfolio.
http://bit.ly/2FfNqdZ

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9. Spread of Sulphur Pricing
The spread between the price of bunker fuel with maximum 0.5% sulphur and 3.5% sulphur could reach as high as $400/mt in 2020 as refineries will lose an annual market of over 200 million mt of heavy fuel oil due to the IMO’s global sulphur limit rule for marine fuels. “As they [refiners] cannot stockpile HFO they will need to find other markets. If HFO has to compete with coal, for example in power stations, the HFO price will fall dramatically as the coal price is about half of the HFO price,” Niels Bjorn Lindberg Mortensen told S&P Global Platts in an interview.
http://bit.ly/2T5f14q

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10. AIS Track of Collision
An AIS animation showing Thursday’s collision between an oil tanker and a Norwegian frigate taking place in the Hjeltefjorden fjord on the west coast of Norway has been released. The tanker Sola TS had just departed a terminal with an escort tug alongside when it collided with the KNM Helge Ingstad, identified in the video as NATO WARSHIP F313, at around 0400 local time. The warship pops up in the video around the 20-second mark, indicating that it was not transmitting AIS at the time of the accident and likely switched on its AIS shortly following the collision.
http://bit.ly/2DgPFuT

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Daily news feed from Seacurus Ltd – providers of MLC crew insurance solutions www.seacurus.com

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