Not sure at all this will be helpful, but there is a regulation regarding marine Heavy Fuel Oils (HFO) and their maximum sulphur percentage / exhaust* gases becoming operative in 2020.
This will cut that percentage from the actual max (around 3.5%), to if I recall correctly, 0.5%. Ships not traveling on USA-waters will not be affected, as they already need to comply with the American regulation (0.3% tops I think); but the whole rest of the world fleet will be affected by this.
As a comparative, car fuel max sulphur percentages (in Spain) were of 0.2%...
in 1994. Nowadays that has been reduced to 10 ppm, or 0.00001%
So 3.5% is >>>>>>than 0.00001%...
*I believe this is worth explaining, as it may be confusing.
The regulation will affect exhaust gas emission, so in order to comply, there will be 2 alternatives
1) The HFO your ship burns has a lower sulfur composition, and thus, exhaust gases will have a lesser sulfur percentage.
or
2) You still buy and burn HFO with high sulfur, but you filter the exhaust gases with a pretty expensive machine
Now that we know this, and has been I believe, pretty well explained and simplified, I'll further develop way 1.
A HFO will have a low sulfur composition if:
- The oil it comes from has a low sulfur composition
- The oil is comes from has a high sulfur composition BUT has been treated and reduced
To finish this, that's starting to be both educational but long, there are a couple of fun facts in this "business".
- Low-sulfur oil comes mostly from Arabia Saudi and Middle-East countries. USA has a good relationship with Arabia Saudi, but as we can see, not a good one with Iran (low sulfur oil producer)
- The majority of the world-oil-sulfur-treating plants are located.... (I'll let you guess)....IN THE USA (and this is expensive AF)
- That pretty expensive machine that I mentioned in way 2, was created and is manufactured in......... (I'm pretty sure you will guess this one too)
New construction ships may be able to purchase the filtering-machine, but as ships don't usually have enough space to put new equipment (because as you can imagine, these machines are huge), older vessels will have to buy low-sulfur HFO
How is this relevant to the topic and OP? Since most of the fleet will start to use low-sulfur oils, the prices on Middle-Eastern oils will be skyrocketing, whereas South American (mostly) will go submarine (a good thing for the people that purchase that north american machine)...
(So YES, this may be a whole conspiracy coming from USA to profit (a lot) and have an excuse to "go to war" with other low-sulphur producing countries (and do some good old plundering))
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