Cruise News - Maritime News

Norway is growing its arsenal of military grade drones for missions that’ll take them into the exhaust streams of ship’s funnels.

With the IMO now supporting the 0.1 percent sulfur cap on marine fuel from Jan. 2020, and with southern Norway below the 62nd parallel officially a European Emissions Control Area, or ECA, the Norwegian Maritime Authority, the NMA, is cracking down on illegal sulfur emissions.

Oslo’s NMA and its domestic enforcement allies — the Norwegian Coast Guard (Kystvakten), the Norwegian Coastal Administration and the police — will share the burden of making shipping to and from Norway compliant with EU, IMO and new Norwegian rules on emissions of sulfur, or rather sulfur-oxide.

Checking for illegal levels of SOx is the job of NMA principal surveyor, Svein Erik Enge, who we meet in Haugesund, a sleepy town in Western Norway being transformed into Norway’s “clean-tech” cluster.

Enge in June of 2018 coordinated and supervised the NMA’s test drone project at the entrance to Bergen Harbor. For a week, a sensor-laden drone operated from the bridge of Kystvakten’s KV Tor was flown into the vapor stream of several ships to take samples of SOx. The exhaust’s electronic sulfur count was instantly transmitted to the KV Tor’s computer screens. Though the drone had kept its safe distance of 50 meters from the vessels, illegal levels of sulfur were detected. The Kystvakten contacted the NMA ashore, and a ship inspection was planned.

“We use it like a police breathalyzer test,” Enge says, adding, “But we still go onboard.” Still, the test inspections were a total success. The drone was “impressive.” It took five minutes for the drone to analyse samples using the leased chemical sensors it carried. The possibilities were endless: “You can notify the next port. You can issue a fee, or you can ask for a (fee payment) guarantee.” The highest fee issues to date has been to the tune of 650,000 kroner, or $75,000. It is understood to have gone to a cruise ship operator.

Since that fateful 2018 test, the Kystvakten has grown its fleet of drones from one to three and is reportedly ready to buy five new ones each year: or five sensors. The information we get from different sources seems contradictory. Enge says, “We only buy the sensors (not the drones),” while another source says the sensors are rented out from commercial players and Norway’s research institutes, like AMOS, who have developed their own “chemical-sniffing” spectral cameras. more...