Earlier this week the International Maritime Organization, the specialised UN agency that regulates global shipping, reported that the IMO 2020 low sulphur regulations have led to a 77% drop in sulphur oxide emissions from ships.
“Thus significantly improving air quality and protecting human health,” the IMO said in a statement.
On 1 January 2022, new global rules in Annex VI of Marpol (the global ship-source pollution control treaty) limited the amount of sulphur in the fuel used on board ships operating outside of emission control areas to 0.50% mass by mass – that’s a near 86% cut. The pre-existing emission control areas were already at 0.1%.
The scale of the change can be seen in the bunker sales from Singapore. There was zero low sulphur fuel sold at Singapore 2012 and 42,685,400 tonnes of all other types of fuel. By 2019, there were 47,463,000 tonnes of all fuel sold, of which about one-fifth (about 9.3m tonnes) was some kind of low-sulphur fuel. Skip forward to the end of 2021 and there was about 49.98m tonnes of bunker fuel sold, of which, 36.74m was a low sulphur fuel, which is about 73.5% of all bunker fuel sold in the Lion City that year.
Sulphur dioxide is a highly reactive gas that is generated when fossil fuels are burned.
Exposure can be detrimental to human health as the compound affects the respiratory system, particularly lung function, and it can irritate the eyes. It can cause coughing and aggravate conditions such as asthma and bronchitis.
Environmental release will cause sulphur dioxide to combine with air and rain which then causes the formation of sulphuric acid. This falls to the ground as acid rain which is harmful to plants in wild ecosystems such as forests and meadows, to aquatic life in rivers and lakes, and which can also corrode buildings. Acid rain was the major cause of deforestation in many nations that was observed from the 1960s onwards.
