The year 2012 may have
marked a high tide for ship scrapping volumes, but vessel owners are still
finding reasons to scrap portions of their fleets. According to one speaker at
SteelMint’s 2017 Steel Scrap & Raw Materials Conference Asia, held in
Bangkok in September, the average age of scrapped cargo vessels has grown
increasingly younger.
Jamie Dalzell, who works in
Singapore for obsolete ship broker GMS, said the frenzied buildup of cargo
fleets in the opening decade of this century continues to yield numerous ships
for recycling, and some of those ships conducted very few voyages.
“In 2016 we scrapped a
2010-built vessel,” said Dalzell, who added that the case was part of a trend
in the sector. He said when he started in the ship dismantling industry about
20 years ago, “the average age of vessels used to be 30 years. Now, we are
regularly scrapping ships that are 10 or 15 years old.”
In 2016 and 2017, the
slumping energy sector has meant that tanker ships and offshore oil platforms
have become more commonly scrapped, according to Dalzell. The capacity of the
ocean freight sector in 2016, despite the recycling activity, still grew by 2.2
percent overall.
Dalzell said the majority of
the world’s cargo vessel dismantling continues to take place in five nations:
India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and Turkey. Activity in each of those
nation’s has become “greener,” said Dalzell, thanks to operators seeking to
comply with the Hong Kong Convention for environmental and worker safety
standards.
Sanjeev Garg of United Arab
Emirates-based Indicaa Group expressed less certainty than Dalzell that the
volume of scrapped ships will remain strong into 2018. “The flow [of vessels to
scrap] has come down; it is decreasing,” stated Garg.
He agreed that environmental
and safety standards have improved rapidly, pointing to a big difference
between “what ship breaking is now and what it used to be.”
Garg said the Indian
subcontinent will remain a global leader in ship recycling because of the “gift
of nature” that is the continental shelf along those nations’ coasts. The shelf
enable gravity to play a role n easily tipping vessels so they can be
dismantled.
SteelMint’s 2017 Steel Scrap
& Raw Materials Conference Asia was Sept. 11-12 at the Avani Riverside Hotel
in Bangkok.
Source:
recycling
today. 15 September 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment