CORUISK

A climate change protest off the coast of Australia's New South Wales State forced an inbound ship to turn back from the country's largest terminal for coal exports on Sunday, the port operator said.New South Wales police said 170 protesters were arrested on Sunday for refusing to move from the shipping channel near the Port of Newcastle.The port, some 170 km (105 miles) from the state capital Sydney, is the largest bulk shipping port on Australia's east coast.A Port of Newcastle spokesperson said disruption due to the protest was "minimal" but that an inbound vessel "aborted due to people in the channel and has been rescheduled to come in".

The Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 to propose new rules governing undersea internet cables in the face of growing security concerns in the wake of two fiber-optic undersea telecommunication cables being severed in the Baltic Sea this week, which is suspected to be sabotage.The FCC eyes new rules to address the national security concerns over the global network of more than 400 subsea cables that handle more than 98% of international internet traffic."With the expansion of data centers, rise of cloud computing, and increasing bandwidth demands of new large language models, these facilities are poised to grow even more critical," FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said.

This week at MarineLink…The IMO 2020 Sulfur Cap essentially ushered in a new type of fuel - VLSFO. With it came the engine problems caused by off-spec or incompatible fuels as producers grappled with the requirement for providing a sulfur content not exceeding 0.05%. As pointed out in Lloyd’s Register’s 2024 Fuel Quality Report, persistent issues involving cat fines, stability, sulfur content and flash point continue, and isolated incidents of chemical contamination are still occurring.If new, alternative fuels such as methanol cause problems onboard, they are likely to be expensive: the fuels themselves are more expensive than fossil fuels and greater volumes are required.

Container shipping companies like Maersk, CMA CGM and COSCO have ordered hundreds of new vessels in recent years meant to help their industry slash greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to meet rising demand from customers and regulators around the globe.Their order books, however, reflect uncertainty over which of a wide array of so-called green fuels will become the standard in the decades to come, and whether supplies will be cheap and abundant enough to keep their fleets in motion.Decarbonizing shipping is important to global efforts to fight climate change because it accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gases, but accomplishing it will be difficult and costly

At a recent seminar in London organized by the International Underwriting Association of London (IUA) and the Association of Average Adjusters (AAA), participants heard how ignoring or not fully understanding the concept of General Average (GA) when concluding charter-party contracts for offshore services could cause problems in the event of an incident or accident.Michiel Starmans, a Fellow of the AAA and Director Legal Department of the Spliethoff Group and Alf Inge Johannessen, an Associate of the AAA and Senior Claims Manager at DOF