Technical Working Group News

Unique collaboration on green fuels, new propulsion technology and hull-form optimization in the workboat sector will lay the foundation for global emissions reduction efforts.The workboat sector, comprising one of the strongest categories of the UK’s Ship Register and including many Small to Medium size Enterprises (SMEs), is leading the charge in developing innovative technologies that will ultimately reduce emissions throughout the wider maritime industry. This is according to the Workboat Association (WA)…

The Workboat Association, the trade, skills and safety standards association for the workboat industry, have announced a new technical working group, with Andy Page of Chartwell Marine, a pioneer in next-generation vessel design, leading as Chairman.The group aims to accelerate the decarbonisation of the workboat sector, in line with the Clean Maritime Plan, by taking a proactive approach to technical support for the supply chain and future technologies. Along-side decarbonization efforts…

As a new decade starts, offshore wind development continues to progress. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to write that the development of the development of offshore wind (OFW) continues to, uh, well, develop.Apologies for that mild sarcasm. But even a quick look-back at OFW always raises the same familiar question: is the glass half empty or half full?Consider developments in the east coast leader in offshore wind: New York.In a webinar in December New York’s NYSERDA –…

On September 26, the State University of New York Maritime College hosted a conference on the emerging east coast offshore wind industry. “Offshore Wind Power, Planning for America’s Ocean Energy” focused on four fundamental topics:• East Coast Wind Farm Overview – Status of the Industry.• Jobs and Supply Chain Technical Working Group.• Wind Farm Port Development.• Offshore Wind Maritime Operations.In some ways, actually clocking in for a day’s work on an offshore wind turbine is tantalizingly close. Ditto for power flowing from an offshore substation to a mainland interconnection.

Representatives of the Port State Control Committee, the governing body under the Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control in the Asia-Pacific Region (Tokyo MOU), convened last week in Putrajaya, for its 26th meeting. The authorities of Peru and Panama applied for full membership, and their applications were unanimously accepted, bringing the total number of Tokyo MOU member authorities to 21, plus a number of observers. The October 5-8 meeting was chaired by Abdul Samad Bin Shaik Osman…

Malacañang has declared that the congestion at the Port of Manila has been resolved, noting the various measures that the government and the private sector have implemented to address the problem. Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda said the operations at the Port of Manila have been completely normalized with the combined efforts of the Cabinet cluster on port decongestion and the technical working group of various agencies. “There was a time that the ports and all the container yards were flooded with empty containers. As of the end of February 2015, this is no longer the situation,” Secretary to the Cabinet Jose Rene Almendras said in a statement.

The deep­sea soft-sediment ecosystem in the immediate area of the 2010’s Deepwater Horizon well head blowout and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will likely take decades to recover from the spill’s impacts, according to a scientific paper reported by the online 
scientific journal PLoS One, and cited by NOAA. The paper is the first to give comprehensive results of the spill’s effect on deep­water 
communities at the base of the Gulf’s food chain, in its soft­bottom muddy habitats, specifically 
looking at biological composition and chemicals at the same time at the same location.

Snowflake Software, specialist in data exchange solutions via Open Standards, has been awarded a contract by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) to provide an open standard Geography Markup Language (GML) encoding and profile for a basic route specification S-100 based maritime data specification. This work builds on Snowflake’s leading role implementing the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Model Driven Approach to managed GML application schema design and optimisation for use in practical applications and web services. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) technical working group Transfer Standard…

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE)/U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) Joint Investigation Team, which is examining the Deepwater Horizon explosion and resulting oil spill, today announced that it will hold a seventh session of public hearings the week of April 4, 2011. The hearings, which will focus specifically on the forensic examination of the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer (BOP), are scheduled to take place at the Holiday Inn Metairie, New Orleans Airport, 2261 North Causeway Blvd., Metairie, La. BOEMRE and the Coast Guard have made the forensic examination report prepared by U.S. Det Norske Veritas (DNV) Columbus…