The bunker ship Southern Valar refuels the Norwegian cruise ship Finnmarken in the port of Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo by myLoupe/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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○On February 8, South Africans settled in to hear President Ramaphosa's State of the Union address. Amidst his usual rhetoric on unemployment, health, climate change and load restrictions, the president said: “With the current Middle East conflict impacting shipping traffic through the Suez Canal, South Africa will not provide refueling services for future ships. We are in a good position to provide that.” We need to reroute via our coast. ”
You could be forgiven for not paying due attention to this interim statement.
What exactly is bunkering? Why should we worry about bunkering occurring at sea? Bunkering involves transferring fuel from one vessel to another at sea . This is a high-risk operation with the potential for serious marine pollution from oil and fuel spills.
Beyond the immediate environmental risks, bunkering contributes to increased vessel traffic and noise levels, which affects the foraging and breeding patterns of diving seabirds, particularly the endangered African penguin.
Bunkering is a relatively recent activity in South Africa and is currently confined to Algoa Bay. The region is known for its extraordinary biodiversity and islands, including St. Croix, which is home to an important colony of African penguins.
Three operators are refueling in Algoa Bay, where four major oil spills have occurred in the area since 2016, negatively impacting more than 200 seabirds, with populations already in decline. numbers are exacerbating the problems faced.
A groundbreaking study has provided scientific evidence linking bunkering and a significant increase in noise from ships that began in Algoa Bay in 2016. This spike in noise correlated with the most rapid short-term decline ever recorded in Africa's penguin population, an astonishing 85% decline in the once largest colony on St. Croix.
Transnet National Ports Authority recognizes the significant environmental impacts associated with bunkering (which are not regulated by South African environmental legislation) and is committed to ensuring that bunkering is carried out responsibly and that environmental, social and marine We commissioned an environmental risk assessment to ensure all risks were addressed. Adequate controls must be in place to identify, avoid and minimize the negative impacts associated with these activities.
A suspension of new refueling licenses is in place pending the outcome of a risk assessment, which was released for public comment on November 30 last year.
There are some serious concerns about the risk assessment and its ability to achieve its objectives, which are set out in comments submitted by the Biodiversity Law Center to Nemai Consulting on 31 January this year. First, the severity of some environmental impacts, such as the potential for ship-marine animal collisions and the impact on marine biota from hydrocarbon spills, appears to be significantly underestimated.
Second, the risk assessment suggests some mitigation measures that are speculative at best from an oil spill management perspective. The risk assessment acknowledges that the biggest concern (in terms of the undeniable impact of refueling on marine ecosystems) is the continued decline in African penguin and Indian Ocean humpback whale numbers, but Both exhibit immediate behavioral responses to non-saccadic noise. Emissions from maritime transport and stationary refueling operations during transport.
We acknowledge that the resulting underwater noise impacts are very important both before and after mitigation. A finding of this nature would normally represent a fatal flaw in the proposed development and would not be incorporated into the risk assessment.
This raises important questions. Why should activities with potentially serious environmental risks take place in a bay with such sensitive biodiversity?
It is reasonable to expect that the socio-economic impact assessment (SIA) that accompanies risk assessment will address this concern. However, this study proved to be overly narrow, focusing primarily on the impact of oil pollution on the fishing, aquaculture and tourism sectors, with limited insight into the socio-economic aspects of offshore bunkering. It turned out that there was.
Notably, SIA acknowledges that commercial considerations precluded the availability of bunker reference cost data, highlighting that a significant portion of the fuel supply value chain is located outside South Africa. Therefore, understanding the socio-economic justification for refueling is extremely difficult, especially when a significant portion of the economic benefits appear to accrue to foreign stakeholders.
Are there any economic benefits for South Africans? Or are governments simply allowing dangerous activities to occur in sensitive ecosystems without any domestic benefit?
Understandably, this risk assessment makes no definitive recommendations regarding the continuation or expansion of bunkering in Algoa Bay. The unsettling aspect of this uncertainty is that the moratorium could be lifted once the risk assessment is completed (and what this means remains unclear).
This potential scenario raises significant concerns as it could pave the way for additional bunkering operators in Algoa Bay and prepare the ground for bunkering activities to spread to other areas. Recent reports have indicated that the South African Maritime Safety Authority (Samsa) is considering St Helena Bay as an additional bunkering destination, with a 'state of the environment' report on bunkering expected to be released in November 2022. has been done.
All of this is happening in a regulatory vacuum. Bunkering is not included in environmental law as an activity requiring an environmental impact assessment, despite advocacy efforts to secure such regulation. This means that bunkering activities are not scrutinized from an environmental perspective before being approved by Samsa and the Transnet National Ports Authority. This would be a very worrying position if the moratorium were to be lifted and additional bunkering operations were to be facilitated.
There is also the less important issue of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) seizing five vessels involved in the bunkering pending an investigation into whether they breached the Customs and Excise Act No. 91 of 1964. be. The key issue here is whether bunker fuel should be considered an import and therefore subject to excise duty. The impasse has halted refueling operations, at least temporarily, although the timeline for resolving the tax issue caused by Sars is not clear.
The environmental impacts associated with bunkering are clearly significant, not the least of which is the dramatic decline of the endangered African penguin population. Moreover, it is unclear how bunkering is justified from a socio-economic perspective, making SIA trends opaque at best.
Given these environmental and socio-economic uncertainties, obvious harm to biodiversity, and potential long-term impacts, careful consideration and a prudent approach should ensure that sensitive ecosystems like Algoa Bay Then bunkering should not be allowed.
Kate Hundley is an environmental lawyer and co-founder of the Biodiversity Law Center, a nonprofit organization that seeks to use law to reverse the catastrophic decline in biodiversity in southern Africa.
