ABS chief warns against classification societies’ involvement in green ship designs
The president and chief executive officer of the American Bureau of Shipping questioned the involvement of ship classification societies in next generation, environmentally friendly ship design – calling it “a fundamental conflict of interest.”
Speaking before a recent shipping industry conference in Houston, ABS President and Chief Executive Officer Christopher Wiernicki said he finds the apparent move by other classification societies into promoting “energy-optimized designs created in-house” to be “deeply troubling.”
“The bottom line is that, since the objectives of the designer and the class society are so fundamentally different, having class societies promote themselves as designers is dangerous,” Wiernicki said.
“It undermines the basic fabric of the industry, it destroys the credibility of class as an independent third party, it has the potential to lead to poor designs that could impact the credibility of the whole industry and it upsets the essential checks and balances between commercial pressures and effective safety and environmental risk management,” he said.
“If ABS were to promote an in-house design for an energy-efficient tanker, how could we retain our integrity if we were then to approve that same design for construction?”
Responding in part to pressure from the European Union, the International Maritime Organization adopted the Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) earlier this year for new vessel construction.
“The EEDI will be the design scorecard of the future,” Wiernicki said.
However, Wiernicki also said the adoption of the EEDI scheme should not equate to classification societies becoming ship designers “in an attempt to increase their market share.”
Wiernicki said discussions internally at ABS as well as with clients and shipyards left him unable to reconcile the concept of a classification society acting as a ship designer that also reviews and approves the same design.
“I will go even further and say that they should not and cannot be allowed to, because wearing both these critical hats undermines the basic safety integrity of our entire industry. This is not a class issue; this is an industry issue,” he said.
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