Spread Cost of Bunker Fuel Transition, Webinar Told

Repost: The extra cost burden of using greener bunker fuels should to be borne collectively, a Wartsila webinar on shipping decarbonisation has heard.

Webinar participant Jan Otto de Kat, of the American Bureau of Shipping, said expecting shipowners to carry the full cost of switching to greener bunker was unreasonable.

“It can’t be left the shipowner. If he is to invest in the technology [to burn alternative bunker fuel], then he must know that the fuel will be available.”

Otto de Kat said that the cost burden should be shared by all actors in the fuel chain — shipowner, charterer, fuel supplier. And he pointed to carbon pricing as one way of redistributing the cost among the interested parties.

Sangram Kishore Nanda, a general manager at Wartsila based in Switzerland, said the cost outlook of bunker fuel had changed. He said the cost of using the fuel should be linked to the cost of buying the fuel.

Before, ships could use fuel and produce CO2 which remained invisible. But this is no longer the case. “There is a price to burning bunker fuel,” he said. Nanda reiterated the point that the cost burden [of paying for CO2] would be better shared.

Finnish engineering firm Wartsila is running a series of webinars this week on the decarbonisation theme. Today’s event took box shipping as its focus.

Source:
Ship & Bunker