Oil Content News

Alfa Laval announced the launch of PureBilge Compact, a compact version of the oily water separator PureBilge, designed to reduce the sytems footprint and ease install.PureBilge Compact is dseigned to be a highly compact and modular solution that provides a great opportunity for small-segment vessels to benefit from the proven oily water separation technology without space and installation constraints. Its reduced footprint and hassle-free installation also makes it an ideal retrofit solution for bigger vessels struggling with filters.PureBilge Compact is designed for 24/7 unmanned operation…

Kongsberg Maritime will provide a suite of equipment to a newbuild ship dubbed SDO-SuRS (Special and Diving Operations - Submarine Rescue Ship) to be built by the Italian shipyard T.Mariotti for Marina Militare Italiana (The Italian Navy).Central to this order are a pair of Kongsberg Elegance propulsion pods, direct electric permanent magnet motor driven pods matched with a Kongsberg electric power system, including batteries and power management system.According to Kongsberg…

The U.S. has imposed a $2 million fine on the owner and operator of a bulk carrier that knowingly committed pollution crimes on the Mississippi River. Greek-based Empire Bulkers and related company Joanna Maritime were sentenced Thursday for committing "knowing and willful violations" of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS) and the Ports and Waterways Safety Act related to their role as the operator and owner of the bulk carrier Joanna.A March 2022 inspection of the…

Canadian shipping company Algoma Central Corporation was fined $500,000 in the U.S. after pleading guilty to dumping wastewater into Lake Ontario.One of the Great Lakes operator's dry bulk carriers, the Algoma Strongfield, was built in China and delivered to Canada on May 30, 2017, by a crew from Redwise Maritime Services, B.V., a vessel transport company based in the Netherlands.During the delivery voyage, while manned by a Redwise crew, the oily water separator and oil content monitor malfunctioned or failed on multiple occasions, which resulted in an accumulation of unprocessed oily bilge water. On May 5, 2017, an Algoma employee…

Two shipping companies incorporated in Liberia pled guilty today in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware, to failing to notify the U.S. Coast Guard of a hazardous condition on one if its vessels and to violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS) by presenting false documents to the Coast Guard that covered up vessel oil pollution.Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division and David C. Weiss, U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware announced the plea agreement.

RWO Veolia is presenting its new products RWO-CBM and OWS-Controller at this year's leading trade fair SMM, focusing on the main topics of smart shipping and green technology. The products are milestones in the development of a fully digitalized system maintenance and will already make the operation of water treatment plants on ships and offshore platforms much more efficient, transparent, safe and environmentally friendly. The Bremen-based water specialists will talk about the…

Non-compliant discharge of oily water continues to be an environmental threat – and an expensive headache for the marine industry. With the tamper-proof Alfa Laval BlueBox SA, a standalone oil content monitor and data recorder, Alfa Laval is providing peace of mind to ship owners and operators. Despite many years of strict enforcement when it comes to oily water discharge limits, there are still high-profile cases that result in extreme fines or jail terms. Naturally, no company can afford to take risks when the consequences are of such magnitude.

Princess Cruise Lines Ltd. was sentenced to pay a $40 million penalty – the largest-ever for crimes involving deliberate vessel pollution – related to illegal dumping overboard of oil contaminated waste and falsification of official logs in order to conceal the discharges. The sentence was announced by Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey H. Wood for the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, and Acting U.S. Attorney Benjamin G. Greenberg for the Southern District of Florida in Miami. The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Judge Patricia A.

The Exhaust Gas Cleaning Systems Association and its members are preparing to meet higher demand for gas scrubbing systems to bring SOx emissions in line with the targets set by the IMO’s 2020 fuel sulfur content proposals. As previously reported by this correspondent in Maritime Reporter and Engineering News (December 2016 issue, page 24; January 2017 issue, page 28), the IMO has come in for some severe criticism over its proposals to introduce a global marine fuels sulfur content cap of 0.5 percent (mass/mass) by the year 2020.

The S-4 screw compressor from Boge Kompressoren has been redesigned, changes designed to make the compressed air system efficient and whisper-quiet at 69 dB(A). The enclosed direct drive provides for low-maintenance continuous operation, even with high dust volumes. The control system, focus control 2.0, supports interconnected operation with up to four units without the use of additional higher-level control. To cater for growing demands from customers for compressed air systems with minimum power consumption in the performance range from 110 to 160 kW…

The fact that improperly-treated gray water pollution is still being dumped off ships in a so-called modern and highly-regulated shipping industry is hypocritical at best. Graywater – which comes from ship accommodation areas (shower/sink), laundry, galley and food pulper – can contain classical pollutants such as nonylphenols, metals, nutrients, surfactants, pathogens, oil, grease, detergent and soap residue. Graywater is sometimes mixed with sewage, depending on the ship design. Graywater can have varying levels of harmful contaminants.

A ship management company has pleaded guilty and was sentenced October 27, 2015 for deliberately concealing pollution discharges from the ship directly into the sea and for falsifying its oil record book, announced U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson along with Rear Admiral David R. Callahan, Eighth District Coast Guard Commander. Chandris (Hellas) Inc. is headquartered in Greece and operated the M/V Sestrea - an 81,502 ton cargo ship that made calls in multiple ports in Texas. Chandris pleaded guilty to a violation of the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships for failing to properly maintain an oil record book as required by federal and international law, as well as a violation of making a false statement for making a false entry in the ship’s oil record book. Shortly following the plea, U.S.

Greece-based Chandris was sentenced for deliberately concealing pollution discharges from the ship and falsifying its oil record book while docked in Corpus Christi, AP says quoting, a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Chandris (Hellas) Inc pleaded guilty to both violations and was ordered to pay an $800,000 fine along with a $200,000 community service payment to the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. Chandris also was sentenced to three years probation, meaning all ships managed by the company will have to comply with an Environmental Compliance Plan, according to the news release. According to court records, the chief engineer of the M/V Sestrea -an 81…

AML Ship Management GMBH, a German company, was sentenced in federal court today to pay a total of $800,000 in fines and community service payments for violating the Clean Water Act and the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships by intentionally discharging 4,500 gallons of oily bilge water into the ocean off the coast of Alaska and then presenting false records to the U.S. Coast Guard. AML was also ordered to implement a comprehensive Environmental Compliance Plan and was placed on probation for three years. During the term of probation, AML will be subject to a heightened level of scrutiny, including warrantless searches of its vessels and places of business based upon a reasonable suspicion that it is violating the law.

The trend of modernizing ships and fitting them with more efficient separator systems, which has been noticeable since 2014 particularly in Europe and North America, has continued seamlessly into the first quarter of 2015, GEA reported. More than 50 OSE separators from GEA from the Oelde site have been ordered since the start of the year for ship modernizations for U.S. and Canadian naval authorities alone. The objective of the retrofits is to make the shipping operations of the navy…

With two centrifuge skids for the treatment of drain water, GEA’s Business Unit Mechanical Separation, recently delivered the first retrofit plant. While drilling for oil, drain water collects on the platform in large volumes, which is passed into large tanks together with other waste water occurring. In conformity with the IMO Regulations MEPC.107(49) this contaminated water must not be drained into the ocean before corresponding treatment and de-oiling. The disposal of drain…

U.S. Attorney Karen L. Loeffler announced  that AML Ship Management GMBH, a German company, and Nicolas Sassin, Chief Engineer of a vehicle carrier ship it operated, the M/V City of Tokyo, were both charged with knowingly dumping oil into United States’ waters off the coast of Alaska in August 2014 in violation of the Clean Water Act. AML and Chief Engineer Nicolas Sassin have also been charged in separate cases filed in the District of Oregon with violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS) for knowingly creating and presenting false records to the U.S. Coast Guard when it arrived in port in Portland, Oregon in September 2014. The Clean Water Act charges in Alaska and the APPS charges in Oregon are felony offenses.

Two shipping firms based in Germany and Cyprus were sentenced today in federal court in Newark, N.J., to pay a $10.4 million penalty for felony obstruction of justice charges and violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships related to the deliberate concealment of vessel pollution from four ships that visited ports in New Jersey, Delaware and Northern California, the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in New Jersey and Delaware, the U.S. Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division and the U.S. Coast Guard announced. Columbia Shipmanagement (Deutschland) GmbH (CSM-D), a German corporation, and Columbia Shipmanagement Ltd.

When dealing with oil and other hazardous contaminants on vessels and in marine facilities, there are some common misconceptions about the way hydrocarbons biodegrade. “The words biodegrade and bioremediate are not interchangeable,” said Jay H. Murland, CEO of EnviroLogic Biobased Technologies Inc. who manufacturer a line of over 30 EPA-approved bioremediation products. To explain further, let’s look at the difference between the processes of bioremediation, bioaugmentation and encapsulation. • Bioremediation occurs naturally all over the earth.

The giant corn harvest about to hit full stride in America's Midwest looks set to overwhelm storage and pile up outdoors, grain industry sources said, raising quality issues and making it hard to keep supplies moving. This year's record corn crop of 14.4 billion bushels alone would fill up 60 percent of the country's grain storage of 24 billion bushels. In total, with a record soybean crop too and hefty harvests of other grains including spring wheat, there will be about 20 billion bushels of new crops looking for storage. That would be on top of the 3.5 billion bushels reported in storage as of Sept. 1 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Noble Drilling (U.S.) LLC was charged with environmental and maritime crimes for operating the drill ship Noble Discoverer and the drilling unit Kulluk in violation of federal law in Alaska in 2012, the Department of Justice announced. Under the terms of a plea agreement filed in federal court today, Noble will plead guilty to eight felony offenses, pay $12.2 million dollars in fines and community service payments, implement a comprehensive Environmental Compliance Plan, and will be placed on probation for four years. In addition, Noble’s parent corporation, Noble Corporation plc, headquartered in London, England, will implement an Environmental…

An Italian shipping firm based in Genoa, Italy, pleaded guilty to violating the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships by falsifying required ships’ documents to hide the fact that the ship had illegally discharged oil contaminated waste into the ocean on multiple occasions, announced the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Carbofin S.PA. (Carbofin) agreed to plead…

A reliable solution for response and prevention that can save money, time and regulatory aggravation is here. The threat of oil pollution has long been a problem in the shipping community. You don’t have to look too far to review the myriad of oil spills that have plagued the industry. The Exxon Valdez spill that occurred 25 years ago has recently come to the forefront once again as there is evidence that the ramifications of the spill are still being felt in the fragile eco-system of several Alaska beaches.