Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-03-Speech-2-314"
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"en.20030603.9.2-314"2
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"Mr President, as Mr Lange has already said, we have made tremendous progress in reducing the emissions from road vehicles, by using better technology, using catalytic converters and lean-burn engines and by supplying better fuel – the ten parts per million diesel which Euro 4 would lay down.
At the same time we have the problem of what to do with the residue from the oil refineries, because we are taking the sulphur out of the fuel used in road vehicles, fuel which is 26 000 parts per million sulphur. So of course we export to the third world. The
tanker was carrying high-sulphur heavy oil from Estonia to Singapore, but a lot of the rest is used in shipping, causing pollution at sea which we prevented on land.
We have an international agreement under MARPOL Annex VI to reduce the sulphur content in sensitive sea areas to 1.5% in the Channel, the North Sea and the Baltic. Even this small step forward will cost one billion euros per year, a cost which will be ultimately borne by the consumers buying the goods which are delivered by ship.
The easy bit is to achieve this, using low-sulphur crude or blending. Stage two as proposed by Mr de Roo will be more expensive and it needs to be carefully costed before we go forward with that. There is of course another approach, and that is not to just look at the fuel, as in cars, but to use abatement technology, so called 'sea-water scrubbers', and I am pleased that the compromise includes provision for trials of this new technology.
As we speak two ferries owned by P[amp]O operating on the Dover/Calais route, an important connection between old and new Europe, are undergoing major refits in Germany. One of them, the
is being fitted with the converter, the Eco-Silencer, and its sister ship the
is not being fitted, although it has been adapted for fitting at a later date. I am confident these trials will show that the benefits of using this technology go over and above the directive in terms of delivering a 95% reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions, as against a 40% reduction which we can achieve through using the fuel. It is a big improvement over MARPOL Annex VI, with the additional benefit of reducing particulates by 80% and a substantial reduction in nitrogen oxide pollution.
The environmental concerns that Mrs Thors expressed need to be addressed, particularly the effects of putting this dilute sulphuric acid into the sea in certain port areas and also how we dispose of the sludge on store in an environmentally sensitive way.
I would like to thank Mr de Roo and of course Mrs Hautala, who started this report, and the other rapporteurs for the constructive way in which we have managed to negotiate an agreement within Parliament."@en1
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"Pride of Canterbury"1
"Pride of Kent"1
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