World shipping body sets tanker safety deadline

World shipping body sets tanker safety deadline

SYDNEY (Reuters): Shipping legislators said on Monday they had
agreed a fast-track timetable for eliminating single-hulled
tankers, a pollution hazard to the world's oceans and coastlines.

"Delegates...agreed to a timetable that will see most single-
hull oil tankers eliminated by 2015 or earlier," said the
International Maritime Organization (IMO), shipping's self-
legislating body.

The European Union, which last year forced IMO to confront the
issue of tanker safety in the wake of the Erika disaster, said it
was satisfied with the 2015 deadline.

"We didn't get all we wanted, but...we're reasonably happy,"
European head of maritime safety Willem de Ruiter told Reuters.

The Erika spilled 8,000 tons of heavy fuel oil into the
English Channel when it broke up during a storm in December 1999.

The IMO agreement between 113 maritime nations from across the
globe followed a week of intense negotiations, during which
Brazil headed an alliance of nations that hoped to push back the
proposed deadline.

Brazil, backed by several developing nations, said that the
ruling could cause a shortage of tanker supply, forcing up
freight costs and adding to the price of oil.

Brazil and its backers won certain concessions, allowing
governments a degree of leeway in phase-out timetables for
single-hulled ships flying their flags.

But other nations will also gain new powers to exclude those
ships from their ports, and Cyprus, Malta and the EU have already
made clear they will do so, according to IMO.

The EU, the most important oil importer in the negotiations,
said it would be sticking to the earliest possible date. "Europe
will not accept anything else but 2015," said de Ruiter.

The EU forced IMO to address the issue of a deadline by
threatening last summer to abandon the IMO process and act
unilaterally, just as the U.S. did in the wake of the Exxon
Valdez disaster.

The Exxon Valdez spilled 35,000 tons of crude over Alaskan
shorelines in 1989, and a year later the U.S. issued its own 2015
tanker deadline -- a move that was seen at the time as
undermining IMO's authority.

Many feared that without the backing of the EU and the U.S.,
IMO would be rendered impotent.

The single-hulled tanker fleet will be replaced by a new
generation of double-hulled tankers, which offer better
protection against oil spillage during low-speed collisions and
groundings.

Double-hulled tankers already constitute about a third of the
world's 300 million ton tanker fleet, and the balance needed is
now being constructed in the shipyards of South Korea, Japan and
China.

Under existing IMO regulations agreed in 1992, single-hulled
tankers would have been scrapped at least four years later than
under the new timetable.

While the main objective is cleaner seas, analysts said the
agreement would boost the earning power of a sector that has
traditionally been plagued by over-supply.

U.S. Investment Bank Lazard Freres estimated that about one
third of the world tanker fleet would now be forced to the scrap
yards between 2002 and 2006.

"We think the underlying fundamentals of the market post-IMO's
adoption of phase-out regulations are being established for
prolonged profitability," it said in a market report earlier this
month.