A Simpler Solution !

There seems no doubt that Sydney is the draw card destination when the cruise industry plans excursions to the South Pacific.   Sydney is the glamour city known and recognised by ordinary people in most world countries.   The bridge and the Opera house are icons that rank alongside the Statue of Liberty in the US  and Big Ben in London.   We are accustomed to receiving a steady stream of these ninety thousand tonne monsters gracing our harbour.

The Sydney port of call is usually for just one day.   The ship sails through the heads in the early morning and the passengers tour the city, spending very welcome money before departure time in the early evening.  All that time the ship is a blaze of lights.  Part of that is to draw attention to what the tour industry describes as the experience of a lifetime, but it is also very necessary because a ships interior is otherwise like a very dark cave.

While cruise ships are welcome in this city, the effluent that is discharged from their smokestack is not.   The bunker fuel that cruise ships use to run their engines is little modified or refined from the crude extracted from oil wells and it has a high sulphur content.   That is fine while the ship is travelling out to sea on an ocean voyage, but when it is in port the engines are kept running to generate the electricity that blaze of lights is consuming.

People living anywhere near a cruise ship berth are subjected to fine particle fallout and this can cause severe medical disabilities and trigger events like asthma attacks.  A law to require cruise ships to convert to a cleaner bunker fuel while in harbours like Sydney came into conflict with Federal law.   The state law required the use of bunker fuel with a 0.1 percent upper limit for fuel oil sulphur content while Federal law allows a higher 3.5% for general shipping.   That cleaner fuel also costs about $ 250 a tonne more than the polluting alternative.

Another problem is the complex nature of changing from one type of fuel to another while the ship is in motion - and that raises the risk of a fire.   The newer ships of the main cruise companies have this conversion built in to their systems, but it is a safety problem for most older vessels.

It seems astonishing that the existing dock facilities for cruise ships in Sydney lack the facilities to allow these ships to plug into the local electricity system.  While in port they need to run their engines to generate the electric power necessary for the ships operation - and to keep all those lights burning.

It is a matter of simple arithmetic.  Arrival and departure accounts for about an hour of engine time.   That entire day sitting at a wharf can be eliminated if the ships engines are shut down and it relies on the local power source for the energy used - and the price of that power would be billed to the cruise company.

We need to install power infrastructure where cruise ships berth and legislate to require that to be used when ships are in port.  Not only would that deliver a cost saving to the cruise industry, it would also ensure that we have a better air quality in Sydney and people living near an arrival and departure point would not be inconvenienced.

It would be the long term solution to both a health and safety problem !