Ballast route

摘要

Because of a lack of signatures to the IMO's Ballast Water Management Convention of 2004, new ships completed this year have been given a new deadline to install a ballast water treatment system. As the situation stands, the deadline is now the earliest date of the second annual survey or 31 December 2011. There may, of course, be a further extension if insufficient signatures are added to the scanty 16 achieved so far. The moratorium that applies to new ships is obviously extended to existing ships, which will have to start retrofitting equipment in a rolling programme that is intended originally to be complete by 2016. That timetable will become effective as soon as the requisite number of signatures has been achieved. When the convention was conceived it was lack of systems and equipment that was seen as the problem, but, as reported in Solutions, there are now a number of fully approved systems and more expecting approval later this year.