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domingo, 5 de abril de 2009

Seaborne pollution: Houston will benefit from regulation of ships

Source: Chron
Houston’s uphill efforts to reduce pollution to meet federal air quality standards have had to contend with some of the dirtiest burning engines in the world.

They aren’t under the hoods of junkers plying area freeways but instead power thousands of large seagoing vessels that dock at the Port of Houston every year, boosting the economy but also pumping tons of health-threatening particulate matter into the city’s air. Shipping produces an estimated 10 percent of air pollution here and is the only largely unregulated source.

That will likely change in the next decade, thanks to a joint proposal by the U.S. and Canada to create a 230-mile emission control area along their coasts where international shipping would be required to switch to auxiliary tanks with cleaner burning fuel before approaching protected coastlines. Negotiations to further expand the agreement are under way to include Mexico, as well as Alaska and Hawaii, which aren’t part of the current deal.

Announced by new Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, the emissions control area plan must be approved by the International Maritime Organization.

The EPA estimates that the reduction of pollutants from the use of cheap, sulphur-laden bunker fuel would prevent the deaths of more than 8,000 North Americans a year from cancer, respiratory and heart disease, among other ailments.

A study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of ship exhaust levels in ports from Charleston to Houston estimated that commercial vessels produce as much pollution as half the world’s automobiles.

Worldwide, the number of deaths attributed to ship-created pollution is 60,000.

If approved by the IMO next year, the new standards could go into effect by 2015 and reduce sulphur in ship fuel by 98 percent, particulate emissions by 85 percent and nitrogen oxide discharges by 80 percent.

Modifying existing vessels and outfitting ships built after 2016 with pollution control equipment will cost the industry an estimated $3.2 billion. That would up the port cost of processing incoming cargo by about $18 a container.

In a joint letter to the EPA in February, Houston mayor Bill White and the Port of Houston Authority strongly endorsed the proposed agreement. They expect it to “push international shipping toward cleaner engines and fuels faster than a collection of disparate programs. This is especially important because projections of shipping activity all agree that the volume of shipping will increase in the future.”

The mayor’s director of health and environmental policy, Elena Marks, says that by covering all U.S. ports, the plan will prevent unmodified ships from clustering at a few unregulated locations and will spread the added cost of shipping evenly among major ports.

“The real beauty of this is that it will create an even playing field,” says Marks. “Currently, states lack the jurisdiction over almost all of the marine vessels and because of the size of the port [here] that has a significant impact on all quality in the Houston area.”

Residents of Houston’s eastside neighborhoods have long had to put up with air pollution not only from refinery and other industrial facilities near the ship channel but also the large vessels that bring feedstocks and commercial goods to the port.

The added ability to reduce air toxics coming from seagoing vessels is a long overdue development that will complement increased enforcement of land-based polluters.

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