Veritas Petroleum Services (VPS) group commercial business development manager Steve Bee has said that the number of fuels that are non-compliant with the sulphur regulations is declining.
Speaking at a Ship & Bunker webinar this week Bee said that the number of fuels that were tested as having sulphur content higher than 0.5% in the period from March-April had fallen to 1.1% from 8% at the end of 2019.
Bee believes that the higher rate of failure could have been due to HFO residues in tanks which had not been cleaned to properly, including bunker storage facilities that were gradually cleansed through the system during the course of bunkering operations.
Only 0.3% of the total non-compliant cases had fuel that was outside the 0.53 parameter, which is considered to be commercially acceptable, the rest of the samples, 0.8% were within the 0.51-0.53 range.
