Surveillance of Sulfur Emissions from Ships in Danish Waters

Abstract

In 2015 new rules from the IMO and legislation from EU (Sulfur directive) requires ships to run with maximum fuel sulfur content (FSC) of 0.1 % m/m in northern European waters. In order to promote a level playing field within the shipping sector, there is a need for measurement systems that can make effective compliance control. This report describes the results from ship emission measurements on the waters surrounding Denmark from June 2015 to July 2017 on behalf of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. The overall aim was to carry out operational surveillance of ships with respect to the EU sulfur directive and particularly the sulfur limits for marine fuel in the European Sulfur Emission Control Area (0.10 %), which entered into force on January 1st 2015, as well as to guide further port state control of ships at the destination harbors of the ships, both in Denmark and other ports. During the project the FSC of individual ships was estimated by perform- ing spot checks of exhaust plumes of individual ships. This was conducted by automatic gas sniffer measurements at the Great Belt Bridge and airborne surveillance measurements using sniffer and optical sensors. The data from the fixed system were transmitted in real time to a web database and alarms were triggered for high FSC ships in the form of emails. The report describes the technical systems and their performance and the general compliance levels of the measured ships. The measurement systems have been developed by Chalmers University of Technology through Swedish national funding and the EU project CompMon.