Provision has been made during Pride of Canterbury's refit to add EcoSilencer technology later following the anticipated success of the trial.

Significantly for the maritime industries, BP Marine and P&O believe the trial will provide further evidence of the benefits of shipboard solutions to improve the environmental performance of shipping. Similar processes are widely used in large scale plants to scrub emissions from shoreside coal and oil fired electricity generating stations. The EcoSilencer is the first to be practically implemented on a small shipboard scale. It has the added benefit of removing other harmful gases and particulates as well as sulphur.

The announcement last month coincided with the start of a debate in the Environment Committee of the European Parliament on a draft EU directive that over time would require all ships to use fuel with low sulphur content. This is potentially a far more costly solution as the special fuel is both expensive and does not address the problem of non-sulphur gases and particulates.

The EcoSilencer brings seawater into close contact with the ship's exhaust gases so as to transfer the oxides of sulphur (SOx) from the gas to the water in a process known as scrubbing.

Seawater is the ideal scrubbing agent as it already contains a number of salts that act to neutralise SOx. As the end product of the process is sulphate, a natural component of seawater, the scrubbing process has a low environmental impact. After scrubbing the seawater is filtered to remove particulates.

Trials are expected to be completed by the summer of 2004, at which time BP Marine will make the results available to industry and legislative authorities.

MJ Information No: 18207