Companhia de Navegacao Norsul

A Japanese ship that ran aground on a reef off Mauritius two weeks ago has now stopped leaking oil into the Indian Ocean but the island nation must still prepare for "a worst case scenario", Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth said late on Monday.Conservationists said they were starting to find dead fish as well as seabirds covered in oil, increasing fears of an ecological catastrophe despite a massive local cleanup operation that includes making floating booms from leaves and human hair.Jugnauth said the leak from a damaged oil tank on board the stricken vessel, the MV Wakashio, had stopped but that it still had 2,000 tonnes of oil in two other, undamaged tanks.

Venezuelan state-run oil firm PDVSA has begun offering to ship its own oil, figuring in the costs in crude supply deals to help customers who have struggled to hire vessels to carry the country’s oil due to U.S. sanctions, according to company documents seen by Reuters.The United States has blacklisted vessel owners, shipping operators and threatened to sanction any tanker facilitating the country’s oil exports as it tightens restrictions on trade with the South American country.Washington has been trying to weaken socialist President Nicolas Maduro by choking the OPEC member’s oil exports, depriving the government of petrodollars — its main source of revenue.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has published its remote meetings calendar for the rest of 2020 after its initial agenda of IMO Council and Committees sessions was scrapped due to the coronavirus pandemic.The first scheduled meeting is set to be a simultaneous, remote extraordinary sessions of all Committees (expected to be held 16-18 September), to address procedural matters. This follows decisions of the IMO Council's thirty second extraordinary session (summary here C.ES 32), which adopted interim guidance to facilitate remote sessions of the IMO Council during the COVID-19 pandemic and invited the Committees to consider utilizing the same guidance.

Mauritians are making floating booms of human hair and leaves in a round-the-clock scramble to mop up oil leaking from a grounded Japanese ship onto their pristine Indian Ocean beaches.The MV Wakashio, owned by the Nagashiki Shipping Company and operated by Mitsui OSK Line, began oozing fuel into turquoise sea waters last week after hitting a reef off the island.Mauritius has declared a state of emergency and former colonial ruler France has sent aid in what environmental group Greenpeace said could be a major ecological crisis.Romina Tello, 30-year-old founder of eco-tourism agency Mauritius Conscious, spent the weekend helping clean black sludge from mangrove swamps.

U.S.-based marine data acquisition services company TDI-Brooks said it recently mapped the Liberty Ship George Vancouver off Freeport, Texas while out on a seabed survey project with the R/V Brooks McCall. The multiple multi-phase geophysical and geotechnical site surveys program consisted of pipeline routing and subsea structures to facilitate route and project design for offshore developers.Equipment used to map the ship was a Teledyne Reson SeaBat T-20 multibeam sonar with integrated Applanix POSMV for Motion. Applying the mesh tools to the multibeam survey shows an example of the shipwreck.Texas has been involved in artificial reef development for nearly 50 years.