REGULATORY DELAY IS HOLDING BACK VITAL SEAFARER TRAINING

In an Opinion piece written for Lloyd’s List, and shared with Maritime Journal, Senior Correspondent Richard Clayton shares concerns about ‘the elephant in the room’ that is seafarer training in the transition to decarbonisation

Several factors must be in place before enough seafarers can be trained to handle the responsibilities of decarbonisation competently. Agreement among regulators on fuels comes first.

New training courses are expensive to develop and take many years to introduce, a factor to be considered given the hundreds of thousands of seafarers needing additional training by 2030. Seafarer training for the transition to decarbonisation is the elephant in the room for an industry keen to embrace sustainable shipping, yet uncertain about what will be required by when.

Maritime Just Transition Task Force report

A November 2022 report commissioned by the Maritime Just Transition Task Force into the skills and competencies needed by future seafarers developed three scenarios for decarbonisation.

The most challenging of these, the Zero Carbon by 2050 scenario, assumes a sharp ramping up of alternative fuels in the 2020s. This will require additional training for 450,000 seafarers by 2030, and 800,000 by the mid-2030s.

Even if the Decarbonisation by 2050 scenario is adopted, there will still be a need for 750,000 seafarers trained to handle alternative fuels and technologies by 2050.

This is a huge ask given the hazards associated with alternative fuels.

Hydrogen presents an explosion risk from pressurised storage; hydrogen, methanol, and ammonia carry the risk of flammability; ammonia and, to a lesser extent, methanol are toxic to humans and the environment. Further risks include corrosiveness, and cryogenic and asphyxiating properties.

Shipping is not devoid of the skills needed to work with alternative fuel technologies because both ammonia and methanol are carried today as bulk cargo. However, hydrogen is not widely carried as a cargo by the tanker/gas segment, and segments such as dry bulk and general cargo shipping have limited exposure to these fuels.

In its study on the training and skills required to support decarbonisation in shipping, DNV Maritime makes the point that several factors must be in place before sufficient numbers of seafarers can be trained to handle the responsibilities of decarbonisation competently.

There must be clear regulations to support significant investment in training facilities. As soon as training programmes have been developed, the instructors must be trained. They will be the drivers for the upskilled and newly skilled seafarers who will be critical to successful decarbonisation.

Finding trainers and experienced seafarers for whichever fuel or fuels the regulators agree on will be one of the industry’s real challenges in the 2020s and 2030s.

Need for regulatory agreement

But already it’s obvious that the first of these factors is falling behind. Regulatory frameworks are struggling to keep up with technological change. Without an agreed framework in place, training will be piecemeal. It’s highly unlikely that decarbonisation will be achieved unless seafarer training is structured in format and global in scope.

The key to establishing a common framework for the provision of seafarer training on new hazardous fuels is a revision of STCW (the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers). STCW has set out training requirements for tankers which could be replicated for alternative fuels, and these could form the basis of appropriate training programmes.

Once a training framework is in place, the industry would develop ship- and fuel-specific training needed for the implementation of new fuel in the fleet.

DNV Maritime concluded that the transition to decarbonisation “is going to last for many decades”. The requirements must be valid for the whole industry, the report comments, even if the future will probably see a mix of fuels rather than a single fuel.

Heavy investment in new training facilities is not expected to take place until IMO and national governments reach agreement on which of these fuels will be supported.

New training courses are expensive to develop and take many years to introduce, a factor to be considered given the hundreds of thousands of seafarers needing additional training by 2030 in decarbonisation scenarios.

Training 750,000 or 800,000 seafarers to handle alternative fuels and technologies will take time and financial input to achieve. But first there must be regulatory agreement.