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Wired also explained that before. In the article of this post they linked to an older article (https://www.wired.com/story/cleaner-ships-more-expensive-hol...). It goes into detail about the scrubbers. Open, closed and hybrid systems. Anything other than a closed system is bad. A closed system itself might or might not be bad (depends on what's done with the waste).

Note that apparently the most common sulphur amount in fuel is around 2.7% (https://www.exxonmobil.com/en/marine/technicalresource/news-...). Currently there's not too much available fuel at 0.50%. What I heard is planned is that they're going to mix the 2.7% and 0.1% sulphur fuel to get to 0.5%.

Going from 2.7% to 0.5% sulphur fuel is apparently an additional cost of 15 billion USD/year. In my opinion once they're at 0.5% new legislation (by the IMO; an organization which basically sets these rules) should be introduced that reduces it further. Often in shipping the actual implementation date is 3-5 years, sometimes 10 years into the future. So new legislation should be introduced to reduce things further.

Secondly, companies can get a significant competitive advantage by not following these rules. As such, countries should be strictly checking if ships and shipping lines are following this. Unlike other industries it's pretty common that a captain is jailed if certain rules aren't followed.




Captains of large merchant vessels are salaried or even quasi-gig employees. Indirect operational control is based at the company hq, which is generally in a different country than the port. This leads hq to order their captains to do unsafe or illegal things to maximize short term profit. I recall an article on hn about a captain who was fired for sailing around a tropical storm instead of straight through it, costing the company a few extra days.

Rules targeting captains (essentially disposable middle management) will be ineffective for this reason. They should instead target the ship itself (capital asset).




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