Recently, Wärtsilä came out with a statement in response to Maersk scrubber comments.The apprehension was about the scrubbers not being the ideal solution for them.
Container Shipping & Trade website reports that Mr Sigurd Some Jenssen, the Wartsila director of exhaust gas cleaning, said, “Maersk has been quite prominent in the press stating that it doesn’t think scrubbers are the solutions for them. That is fair enough but what we see in the newbuilding sector shows that actually the majority of contracts are vessels being built with scrubbers – contrary to the message Maersk is giving out.”
In that report Mr Jenssen underlined the advantages of using scrubbers. According to him, “The advantage with scrubbers is that the cost of heavy diesel oil is much lower than low sulphur fuel and it allows the same fuel infrastructure both on shore and on board the vessel to continue to be used.” This is the reason why Wartsila have included the delivery of scrubbers to two 11,000TEU box shops to the Hyundai Merchant Marine.
“I believe that scrubbers are the best way of complying for existing ships. They are an easy and low-cost solution to the challenge.” newspapers have reported Mr. Jenssen pointing this out, while commenting on the retrofit advantage of using scrubbers over LNG.
Although he stressed on the use of scrubbers yet he pointed out that there isn’t any “single right solution” for this. “There is a place for both this and for scrubbers.” he adds.
In future there will be a trend of this mixed baggage use where shipowners will make a variety of choices to comply with the single fleet 2020 sulphur cap. Thus a mixture of scrubbers, LNG and compliant fuel is the ideal way out of this mess.
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Source: Container Shipping & Trade
