Fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly ship designs may be the buzz words in some sectors but three leading Greek shipowners attached an almost unanimous lack of importance to their effect on business in the near term.
“I have serious doubts about the new technology. We have to be cautions and need to see how these vessels will perform over a year, in rough seas and monitor them,” said head of Capital Shipmanagement, Evangelos Marinakis.
“As an industry we need to sort out our problems and then talk about newbuildings,” he added.
Angeliki Frangou of the Navios group was equally dismissive of the benefits of the new designs.
“I don’t care about fuel efficient vessels,” she commented in the course of a discussion during the TradeWinds Shipowners Forum.
George Economou of DryShips and the Cardiff group also said he felt the gain from fuel efficient designs would not greatly enhance the return on capital invested.
More categorical than any of the three Greeks, however, was OSG chief Morten Arntzen who lashed shipyards for drawing up new vessel designs that they are marketing at lower prices at a time when there is an oversupply of tonnage.
“After four years of subsidizing the oil industry we are being asked to subsidise the shipyards and the brokers,” Arntzen said.
The owners’ comments came in a panel discussion that followed earlier speeches where speakers at a more technical level had laid out the pros and cons of the changing technology requirements.
Both Niels Bjorn Mortensen of Maersk Maritime Technology and Christopher Wiernicki of ABS pointed to increasing bunker costs as the most significant driver for new technology, while also highlighting more stringent regulations on emissions that call for improvements.
Mortensen noted that a decade of continued challenges and opportunities is coming, including complex and costly goal-based regulations, fierce competition and limited finance available.
While a number of technological developments are available both for newbuildings and for retrofitting on existing ships, Mortensen pointed out that a crucial part will also be played by management systems.
“You can’t manage what you can’t monitor. Documented performance will be a key issue for the future in newbuildings,” he said.
Among other factors affecting the market Wiernicki also concluded that managing operating efficiency will play a key role. For example, he said, in relation to hull resistance the simple failure to clean a vessel’s hull regularly could reduce efficiency by up to 30%, wiping out all gains from innovative technology.
