With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1199442
( the informer ) ON THE RADAR FUEL INTENTIONS Calling emissions scrubbers on cruise ships a retrograde measure, the World Wildlife Fund and other groups say the industry should move from oil to alternative fuels. There are two options: ISTOCK T hey glide in and out of Coal Harbour like massive wedding cakes or, in the worst-case scenario for passengers, 15-storey petri dishes. Starting in April, typi- cally, cruise ships are a daily presence in Vancouver for much of the year. The Port of Vancouver says the city welcomed more than a million cruise passengers in 2019. All told, there were 288 cruise ship arrivals, bringing 22 percent more passengers than the previous year. On average, each new arrival stimulates about $3 million in direct local economic activity, says the Port. Although the number of ships squeezing un- der the Lions Gate Bridge will fall slightly in 2020, passenger visits are projected to swell by roughly 10 percent, to 1.1 mil- lion, thanks to larger vessels. Cruise ships bring tourists, and money, to town. They bring other stuff, too—emissions, sludge, grey water and under- water noise that affects local orca populations. Are cruise ships worth the price we pay? One major environmental issue dogging the oil-powered cruise industry is how it deals with exhaust. A new interna- tional protocol called IMO 2020 calls for cruise ships to keep sulphur emissions no higher than 0.5 percent, but Vancou- ver regulations already require a more stringent 0.1 percent. To shrink emissions, most cruise ships use scrubber systems that remove sulphur and particulate matter from exhaust. The scrubbers pro- duce wastewater and a sort of sulphur sludge, which is among the waste products handled lo- cally by Tymac Launch Service. "In general, scrubbers are a stopgap measure," says Edward Downing, director of communications at the Vancouver-based Clear Seas Centre for Responsible Marine Shipping. " LNG [liquefied natu- ral gas] is definitely a lower- carbon fuel option, lower in CO2 emissions." Andrew Dumbrille, senior specialist for sustainable ship- ping at World Wildlife Fund Canada in Ottawa, isn't a fan of scrubbers. "A typical seven-day cruise voyage produces five tonnes of scrubber sludge and Not Wanted on the Voyage Cruise ships deliver big financial benefits to B.C., but critics wish they would jettison their environmentally unfriendly ways by Steve Burgess T O U R I S M SOURCES: CLEAR SEAS CENTRE FOR RESPONSIBLE MARINE SHIPPING, PORT OF VANCOUVER Liquefied natural gas is touted as the future for cruise ship fuel. But no LNG ships run Vancouver routes, and there are few in service anywhere else. However, most operators have them on order, following the lead of Carnival Cruise Lines, which operates a handful of the vessels in Europe. LNG FEBRUARY 2020 BCBUSINESS 19 This past September, Vancouver hosted the Norwegian-built MS Roald Amundsen, one of the world's first two hybrid electric cruise ships. But like electric cars, these vessels will prob- ably require more recharging in- frastructure to gain a secure foothold in the market. Electricity PLEASE CALL AGAIN Each cruise ship visit to Vancouver yields an average of $3 million in local economic activity