2015:19. ZVT. Markku Mylly, EMSA. GotMoS.

Listen to the interview with Markku Mylly, EMSA or read the transcript below. . – Mr Markuu Mylly, thank you for participating at this Motorways of the Sea conference. Can you please introduce yourself? . – First of all, thank you for inviting me to this conference. I’m Markuu Mylly, I’m a Finn, from Finland, where I have been working in maritime administration for 25 years and prior to that, I was a sailor, sailing on the high seas for 15 years, and now the last three years in EMSA. But this is not my only contact to EMSA; when I was working in Finland as a director of the maritime administration, I was the Finnish representative in EMSA’s administrative board since 2005, so when I took my position in 2012 the house was not totally unfamiliar to me, so I knew the majority of the tasks and challenges in the agency before I took my office there. . – That sounds good, smart start! – Yeah! . – Please give a short resume from your held presentation. . – About the presentation: I was having a topic about the Sulphur Directive, its implementation and the challenges in the coming years. I think the main message with my presentation was that the implementation of the Sulphur Directive which came into force in the beginning of this year has gone very well; the industry has taken their responsibility, the uncompliancies of the shipping sector are very few and those uncompliancies which I described in my presentation, they’re mainly of administrative nature. So there was some malfunction in the recording to logbooks, about the changeover of fuels or there was missing samples, things like that. Very, very few violations against the regulation, and I was happy also to hear that the same experience is in Canada. On the Canadian side and in United States’ side, it is exactly similar experience. . – Thank you. What is the next upcoming maritime issue that will be discussed in a global perspective and in a regional perspective? . – Well, I would like to say that on a global level there are a few topics which are not new but they are still there, because of the ratification of IMO resolution has taken longer than was expected; the ballast water convention is one of those. The other one is the Hong Kong convention which deals with the superscrapping and dismantling of existing vessels because EU wants that all the EU flagged vessels will be dismantled in a recognized scrapping installation in the future. In the pipeline, of course we have this global sulphur reduction requirement, which is based on the IMO decision to go down to 0.5% in sulphur content on a global level, and it depends of the 2018 review of the availability of the fuel, if it comes into force in 2020 or if it’s postponed to 2025. We will see that. And then, the big issue will be also the greenhouse gas emission control which comes into force on the European level in 2018. So a lot of environmental related issues are still in the pipeline in the coming years and they will be challenges for the industry but also for the administrations who are controlling and monitoring these issues. . – Thank you. To learn from other transport modes, what do you think is the primary issue, if any, that shipping as a transport mode should look further into? . – There are issues where we can learn from the other transport modes. We are at the moment dealing in EMSA with a couple of those issues. The other one is accident investigation: there are still a lot of accidents on the European waters and of course globally for the shipping sector but on the European waters, EMSA is one of the key actors in developing a so-called EMCIP database, which is the European level maritime accident database, which is similar to what the aviation already have and the railway agencies already have. So we have been feeding in all the reports which is a compulsory obligation for the Member States today based on the directive, Accident Investigation Directive, that they have to report all the major accidents on their national waters and their economic zones under the national flags to EMSA database. We are still working on that, that we have a harmonised reporting obligation to all Member States, to be easier for EMSA in the future from that database then make analyses of the accidents, and being able to make analyses of the accidents so we can be more proactive when putting forward new regulations and directives, to be preventative, not only regulating accidents after the accident, being reactive to those. So we want to be more proactive in that sense. The other issue which is ongoing on the European level is so-called implementation of the national single window project, which means we want to minimise the administrative burden on the ships when they are trading under European, between the European Member States. This is something which is already existing on the lorries when they go from state to state on the European level so they don’t have to present all the papers and documents; there’s an electronical format on that and we are building up a similar system on the maritime side, and now when the directive is in force already and we have the national single windows partially working so we want to enrich and enhance that system so that it will be fully operational in a due course. . – Wow, that’s impressive! What are the success factors enabling us to take the technical leap? . – I would say that on the European level, new innovations and possibilities to deploy innovations are very well received. We have a lot of short sea shipping which is in a very tough competition situation on the European level. If there is a good innovation that can be taken into use and the ship owners, freighters and other stakeholders see the benefits of that innovation, so I don’t see that big threshold on the European level to take those innovations into use. On a global scale, it’s much more complicated and of course there’s maybe not in that sense need for this kind of innovative solutions. On the European scale, every euro, every crown, every dollar which can be saved via the innovations is a benefit for the stakeholders. So in this sense I could say that on the European level the know-how, also the positive and open approach for new innovations is paving the way for taking use of these new innovations. . – Exciting. What do you think is the most vital component to be able to make a full transition into a more safe, environmentally and energy efficient, still profitable, transport at sea? . – On the European level I think very much supporting so-called quality shipping, a level playing field on the European waters so that we have similar regulations here. Of course shipping is a global industry, but on the European level when we have some of these regional regulations so it should cover minimum the whole European sea area so that there is no distortion whatsoever in the European shipping. This is a big challenge for European shipping. I see that there still are environmental and energy related issues which can’t be solved via the new innovations and we have to use all the tools which are available: financial tools offered by the EU Commission, also political support offered by the Commission to deploy these environmental issues on the shipping sector. So building viable, economically viable, quality shipping on the European level, so I see that this is the only way to survive the EU flagged shipping, under the EU flag. . – Thank you. So is there anything you would like to add? . – Maybe I could add that even though there has been a lot of criticism against these environmental rules and regulations, there are some fore-runners on the European shipping, and I think this example of these fore-runners have been taken onboard also with the other shipping companies which are a bit more reluctant to deploy these regulations. I think everyone understands that we also have to bear our responsibility about saving the global climate, and the seeing the situation today which has been eased a lot because of the low oil price, so I think the threshold to deploy these environmental requirements onboard the shipping companies has been lower. In the future, I also see that even though if the prices of fuel will rise, these environmental issues have been deployed already on the shipping companies and they are there to stay. I don’t think anybody will question in the future anymore about these challenges and these investments which have been done on the shipping. We are going more and more to deploy LNG on the European level and I believe that on the short-sea shipping, LNG and maybe also the alternative fuels, will be very much taken into use in the coming years. Maybe not in 5, 10 years time, but let’s say 15 years onwards, we will see lot of more cleaner fuels in the shipping sector: LNG, methanol and maybe also some other energy sources which will be used on the shipping sector. . – Thank you very much! – Thank you.