A Global Push for Lower Sulphur Limits in Maritime Industry
A new policy brief by the Washington DC-based International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) is urging the maritime industry to adopt a global 0.1% fuel sulphur limit and to ditch open-loop scrubbers. This move aims to significantly reduce air pollution and its associated health risks, building upon the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) 2020 regulation that lowered the sulphur cap from 3.5% to 0.5%.
Despite the 2020 regulation, projections indicated that shipping emissions would still contribute to approximately 266,000 premature deaths annually due to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. The ICCT’s new analysis suggests that further reducing the sulphur content to 0.1% globally could prevent thousands of these deaths and save billions in terms of health costs.
The report evaluates four scenarios: a baseline with the current 0.5% sulphur limit, and three others where a 0.1% limit is implemented with varying compliance methods, including the use of scrubbers and marine gas oil (MGO). Findings reveal that stricter sulphur limits, especially when ships switch to cleaner fuels like MGO, lead to substantial reductions in fine particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions, thereby improving air quality and public health outcomes.
Moreover, the transition to lower sulphur fuels could have economic implications. By increasing the baseline cost of marine fossil fuels, the price gap between traditional fuels and zero or near-zero greenhouse gas emission alternatives may narrow, potentially accelerating the adoption of cleaner energy sources in the shipping sector.
While the IMO has established Emission Control Areas (ECAs) with stricter sulphur limits, the ICCT advocates for a uniform global standard. Such a measure would not only harmonise regulations but also amplify health benefits worldwide.
Reading the report, Sönke Diesener, a shipping expert at German environmental NGO NABU, commented: “Scrubbers are a poor compromise: they prolong the use of dirty heavy fuel oil artificially and lead to considerable pollution of the marine environment. A global ban on scrubbers must accompany the introduction of stricter sulphur limits.”
Discharges from open-loop scrubbers will be banned in internal waters and port areas throughout the northeast Atlantic by July 2027, following a meeting of environment ministers from 15 European countries last month. A closed-loop discharge ban has been scheduled for no later than January 2029.
Scrubber discharge bans are now commonplace across the world as the map below compiled by the Clean Shipping Alliance highlights. In gross tonnage terms, 30% of the global merchant fleet now have scrubbers – also termed as exhaust gas cleaning systems – installed five years on from the start of the global sulphur cap, a regulation that made owners decide between installing scrubbers or buying more expensive lower sulphur content fuel.
