Most OWSs of today are ineffective and costly, and shipping industry is faced with a challenge: Regulation stipulates how to deal with oily sludge and bilge water - two main types of OW and shippers incur high onshore disposal costs for OW dampening pressured margins - why owners prefer to extract vast amounts of water from all OW onboard and release cleaned water to sea to unburden onboard storage.
FMT from Faroe Islands develops a unique solution for treating oily water on vessels and ashore. Ambition is to make the most effective and economically attractive OWS on the market. FMT has worked many years on developing OW cleaning systems - resulting Sludge Dewatering Evaporator, SDE.
Most OWS’s only deal with the lightly contaminated fraction of oily water; bilge water from engine room and equipment cleaning. This is easier to handle because of lower oil content. In contrast, more heavily polluted sludge originates from fuel oil and ‘luboil’ separators that regularly purify oils from moisture before use in engine. Hence, onboard storage fills quickly and adds large costs for disposal, equipment and operations. What’s more, illegal disposal is still rife and operators often turn a blind eye. Consequence is polluted waterways posing existential threats to life in ocean and coastal habitats.
Shipowners/regulators indirectly put demands on machine-crewmembers they barely can comply with, as current solutions are not able to full-fill all regulatory requirements. When caught disposing illegally, fines can go into the millions of euros and even be followed by imprisonment. Larges owners and operators have for many years been frustrated by this situation and they have long been searching the market for more effective solutions.
FMT builds the solution to modern day requirements. An early prototype of the new SDE is installed on one of the vessels of the large shipowners and an energy plant ashore. SDE is the only solution that can effectively separate oil and water from all types of sludge or oily water onboard and thereby eliminating in-harbor disposal costs.
All ships are legally required to have equipment to treat bilge water, and it must be tested and type approved according to MEPC 107 (49) . Vessels of 400-10,000 GT shall be fitted with oil filtering equipment complying with Marpol and oil content of effluent must be <15 ppm and the ship has in operation an oil discharge monitoring and control system and oily water separating/filtering equipment, OWS .
Regulations demand untreated sludge stored safely in special tanks until transferred to land. Currently, oil contained in sludge is of no value and only creates disposal costs for operators. Pressure on on-board storage facilities mounts and leads to sludge being released illegally, f.x in so-termed ‘magic pipe’ installations, where the crew deliberately, but illegally, makes it look like the Oil Measuring Device, OMD (ppm monitor) <5 ppm.
