London — Shipping giant A P Moller-Maersk and Dutch tank storage company Royal Vopak plan to start a 0.5% sulfur bunkering facility in Rotterdam ahead of the tough new sulfur cap from January 2020, Maersk said in a statement Monday. Receive daily email alerts, subscriber notes & personalize your experience. "A.P Moller - Maersk and Royal Vopak...have agreed to this first joint initiative which will cater for circa 20% of Maersk global demand, enabling A.P. Moller - Maersk to deliver approximately 2.3 million mt per year," it said. The move is a step towards supplying Maersk and other shippers with compliant 0.5% fuel to meet the International Maritime Organization's 0.5% global marine sulfur cap to be introduced on January 1, 2020. "We trust that this initiative will put to rest some of the concerns the industry has on fuel availability as well as secure our continued competitiveness in the market," Niels Henrik Lindegaard, Head of Maersk Oil Trading, said. The announcement comes soon after Vopak announced plans to upgrade its Europoort facility at Rotterdam to support 0.5% sulfur fuel oil bunkering. "We will convert roughly 500,000 cu m of capacity to store and handle low sulfur fuel oil in Rotterdam. This investment is supported by customer commitments and will be completed in the second half of 2019," Vopak CFO Gerard Paulides said in an analysts' presentation Friday. "In our oil hub terminals, the priority was to invest for the IMO 2020 bunker fuel regulations. Our terminals in Fujairah, Rotterdam, and Singapore will be fully ready to support new market requirements," Royal Vopak's chief executive officer Eelco Hoekstra said in a statement with the company's H1, 2018 results Friday. --Eleni Pittalis, eleni.pittalis@spglobal.com --Tom Washington, thomas.washington@spglobal.com --Edited by Jeremy Lovell, jeremy.lovell@spglobal.com
Shipping major AP Moller-Maersk and Dutch tank storage company Royal Vopak have teamed up to build a 0.5% sulphur bunkering facility in Rotterdam to provide fuel as mandated by the International Maritime Organization's sulphur cap initiative. The project will see 500,000 cubic metres of storage for the low sulphur fuel at the port and will be supported by customer commitments. The facility is scheduled to be completed in H2 2019. Royal Vopak also noted that its oil hub terminals in Fujairah, Rotterdam and Singapore will be ready for the IMO sulphur cap regulation by 2020.