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.