EU MRV: 'Amount of data required is daunting'

 
[...] The latter was a hint at fears that the EU MRV won’t be fully aligned with the anticipated global data collection system for ships’ fuel consumption under development at the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

Anna Ziou, Policy Advisor, UK Chamber of Shipping, was even more critical. "The EU MRV looks like it will come with huge cost to industry,” she said, in part because of the required involvement of a third party independent verifier. She said the documentation required for each company to give to the verifier for each voyage, even short ones, was huge. Moreover, she said it was likely the verifiers would find gaps and request more information, creating an extra workload.
 
The sentiments of Ziou and Larsson were echoed by Philip Roche, partner at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, which hosted the panel debate.
 
“We want our clients to be successful in business," and most shipping firms don’t employ sufficient technical staff that can deal with these things, especially the smaller operators, he said.
 
Roche also said that regulators must "swallow their pride," and make sure regulations work properly. He added that it was important that if IMO comes up with a system, the EU doesn’t refuse to withdraw its own even if they are slightly different.
 
But Julien Dufour, CEO of Verifavia Shipping, disagreed with Ziou’s assessment of how complicated the EU MRV will be. "At the end of the day it is about reporting data, most of which shipping companies already do," he commented. He said companies already collect cargo and fuel use data so it was just a question of "finding data that is already there" and report them.

Larsson from WWL agreed that a large part of the data is already captured, but said there are a lot of data required under the EU MRV proposals that are not. 

Dufour conceded that cargo data for ro-ro vessels were more complex, but said in general data on fuel use, and arrival and departure is known. He said obtaining data on  cargo, apart from some special cases, was also quite straightforward. [...]

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